Being the blog of Charles Stross, author.

The 21st century: FAQ

Q: What can we expect?

A: Pretty much what you read about in New Scientist every week. Climate change, dust bowls caused by over-cultivation necessitated by over-population, resource depletion in obscure and irritatingly mission-critical sectors (never mind oil; we've only got 60 years of easily exploitable phosphates left — if we run out of phosphates, our agricultural fertilizer base goes away), the great population overshoot (as developing countries transition to the low population growth model of developed countries) leading to happy fun economic side-effects (deflation, house prices crash, stagnation in cutting-edge research sectors due to not enough workers, aging populations), and general bad-tempered overcrowded primate bickering.

Oh, and the unknown unknowns.

Q: Unknown unknowns? Are you talking about Donald Rumsfeld?

A: No, but I'm stealing his term for unprecedented and unpredictable events (sometimes also known as black swans). From the point of view of an observer in 1909, the modern consumer electronics industry (not to mention computing and internetworking) is a black swan, a radical departure from the then-predictable revolutionary enabling technologies (automobiles and aeroplanes). Planes, trains and automobiles were already present, and progressed remarkably well — and a smart mind in 1909 would have predicted this. But antibiotics, communication satellites, and nuclear weapons were another matter. Some of these items were mentioned, in very approximate form, by 1909-era futurists, but for the most part they took the world by surprise.

We're certainly going to see unknown unknowns in the 21st century. Possible sources of existential surprise include (but are not limited to) biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI, climate change, supply chain/logistics breakthroughs to rival the shipping container, fork lift pallet, bar code, and RFID chip — and politics. But there'll be other stuff so weird and strange I can't even guess at it.

Q: Eh? But what's the big picture?

A: The big picture is that since around 2005, the human species has — for the first time ever — become a predominantly urban species. Prior to that time, the majority of humans lived in rural/agricultural lifestyles. Since then, just over 50% of us now live in cities; the move to urbanization is accelerating. If it continues at the current pace, then some time after 2100 the human population will tend towards the condition of the UK — in which roughly 99% of the population live in cities or suburbia.

This is going to affect everything.

It's going to affect epidemiology. It's going to affect wealth production. It's going to affect agriculture (possibly for the better, if it means a global shift towards concentrated high-intensity food production, possibly in vertical farms, and a re-wilding/return to nature of depopulated and underutilized former rural areas). It's going to affect the design and layout of our power, transport, and information grids. It's going to affect our demographics (urban populations tend to grow by immigration, and tend to feature lower birth rates than agricultural communities).

There's a gigantic difference between the sustainability of a year 2109 with 6.5 billion humans living a first world standard of living in creative cities, and a year 2109 with 3.3 billion humans living in cities and 3.2 billion humans still practicing slash'n'burn subsistence farming all over the map.

Q: Space colonization?

A: Forget it.

Assuming we avoid a systemic collapse, there'll probably be a moon base, by and by. Whether it's American, Chinese, Indian, or Indonesian is anybody's guess, and probably doesn't matter as far as the 99.999% of the human species who will never get off the planet are concerned. There'll probably be a Mars expedition too. But barring fundamental biomedical breakthroughs, or physics/engineering breakthroughs that play hell with the laws of physics as currently understood, canned monkeys aren't going to Jupiter any time soon, never mind colonizing the universe. (See also Saturn'sChildren for a somewhat snarky look at this.)

The rapture of the nerds, like space colonization, is likely to be a non-participatory event for 99.999% of humanity — unless we're very unlucky. If it happens and it's interested in us, all our plans go out the window. If it doesn't happen, sitting around waiting for the AIs to save us from the rising sea level/oil shortage/intelligent bioengineered termites looks like being a Real Bad Idea. The best approach to the singularity is to apply Pascal's Wager — in reverse — and plan on the assumption that it ain't going to happen, much less save us from ourselves.

These are all political ideologies that emerged out of the Westphalian settlement and the subsequent European Enlightenment. This settlement was typified by the ascendancy of the nation state as an atomic administrative entity with relatively non-porous boundaries and legal and trade systems. We seem (at present) to be moving towards a much more globalized, diffused model of sovereignty and legal systems. Currently 70% of primary legislation in the UK originates in the EU (via the European Parliament, European Commission, or Council of Ministers); even in the USA, a country noteworthy for its sense of exclusive legislative independence, a surprisingly high proportion of US federal law originates as a result of WTO treaty processes. Autarky is already difficult to achieve and maintain without extreme privation, as witness the state of North Korea (deliberately isolationist and self-sufficient) or Zimbabwe (wilting under international trade sanctions.

We're still waiting for the definitive ideological polarity of the internet era to emerge, although Bruce Schneier has opined that the key political hot potato of the 21st century will be the question, "how do we maintain the concept of privacy in an age of ubiquitous communications and surveillance", and some believe that privacy is already dead. Given the way Moore's Law is taking us towards an essentially unlimited ability to record everything, I'm not able to argue with the inevitability of surveillance: what I'd dispute is the morality of it.)

Q: What about religion?

A: Doctrinaire religious beliefs that prescribe a specific way of life and ban certain technologies may be a major threat to our ability to adapt to a changing world — but as long as they are confined to their practitioners the rest of us can probably survive them. However, if religious beliefs erupt onto the larger stage (for example, when believers acquire the levers of power and legislate their taboos into the code by which entire nations run) we may have problems. Example #1: The US federal ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research badly damaged the pursuit of medical treatments for a number of conditions (such as Parkinson's Disease). Example #2: a Saudi judge has issued a ruling banning the use of alcohol as a fuel: "the prophet has cursed not only who drinks it but also those who use it for other purposes". These are relatively minor examples of doctrine colliding with the modern technosphere; if nothing worse happens in the 21st century, we'll be lucky. Possible example of something worse: the Vatican has just muddled into the global debate on illegal drugs by denouncing harm reduction strategies — and risks making things that much worse, just as their principled anti-condom stance poured gasoline on the African AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.

Q: Are we going to survive?

A: No — in the long run, we are all dead. That goes for us as individuals and as a species. On the other hand, I hope to have a comfortable, long and pleasant life first, and I wish you the same!

This settlement was typified by the ascendancy of the nation state as an atomic administrative entity with relatively non-porous boundaries and legal and trade systems.

The argument I've been making is that it's patently unfair for governments to operate with geographic monopolies. What if I like my neighborhood, but not my government? Why should I subscribe to their laws? I want to subscribe to the Swedish legal system for copyright and the American government for military protection (and I'd rather buy police protection from a private contractor, simply because government police are rather scary).

In reality, I would like to get people out of the business of government. As you said, we don't send canned monkeys to Jupiter because it's a physically hostile environment. Sending people into politics puts them into a cognitively hostile environment- we send robots to Mars because they're adapted to the environment, and politics should be handled the same way.

A: No — in the long run, we are all dead. That goes for us as individuals and as a species. On the other hand, I hope to have a comfortable, long and pleasant life first, and I wish you the same!

Man, if only more people understood this we'd live on a much happier planet! On the religion section I'd have added the UN making it a crime to criticise religion and the knock-on effect this could have. Not good.

I hope your prediction of increased city-based living. Don't get me wrong, I'd personally prefer a nice wee cottage in Wester Ross or something, but it's just not the way forward for the planet. The idea of returning large areas to a 'state of nature' is hugely important and something the self-important organic crowd seem to forget...

Charlie, was something wrong with the bed you bought the other day. I agree with most of what was said, but mate you'll scare the heck out of folks talking like this.
I'm not really sure if most folks are emotionally mature enough to handle half the issues you mention. I mean lets not kid ourselves here, a large portion of the 6 billion plus people on this planet, practice large scale, Santa Claus like wish fulfillment to invisible men (or man)[sometimes woman - who is really a man or father or the man, etc...] who live in the sky.

t3knomanser@4 - I think that is what happened in Snow Crash. In fact, I think Neal Stephenson experimented with that style of human social evolution in a few of his novels.

Cannonball Jones@5 - that's assuming an explosion in urban growth means a similar marked reduction in non-urban living. The figures (albeit only predictions, but this is one area where predictions are relatively accurate) don't seem to support that hypothesis.

In fact, from what I've seen, they suggest that the vast majority of total world population growth (say 2 billion in the next 20 - 30 years) will happen in urban centres, but it's clear that if urban growth is 2 billion and world growth is also 2 billion, we're not actually seeing a reduction of population in non-urban environments, just a stagnation of population growth. Longer term this may lead to depopulation (as more young people leave and older people reach the end of their lives) but there's no indication of that happening yet.

Meanwhile urban environments will also have to expand if they are to encompass this population influx, so, short of some radical rethinking of world agricultural policy, I don't predict this will massively improve the current situation.

Hmm, if we are talking big thoughts here, I'd suggest the mostly missing elephant from that list is 'resources'. Be it energy, oil, water, CO2, phosphates, lithium, uranium or any one of a hundred others - nothing happens if those aren't available. Control, access to them, etc. are more important than politics (although often distorted by it).

The shape of the future is determined by those resources, and their absence.

Seriously though, this was a very insightful and frank examination of some things we, as people and as a species need to face.

"No — in the long run, we are all dead. That goes for us as individuals and as a species. On the other hand, I hope to have a comfortable, long and pleasant life first, and I wish you the same!"

I wonder if the key to all this is how we can apply that last statement - living a "comfortable, long, and pleasant life" - to us as a species as much as to the individual.

I know we're not going to go on forever, but do we really want to it to end so...badly? I think the choices we make going forward will determine if the mistakes we have made up til now will be remembered by our successors (whoever they turn out to be) as youthful errors, or the last stages of species-level dementia.

@2 that's going on the front of my t-shirt this weekend.
@3 that's going on the back.

As for religion, between the Rapture loons (no geeks involved) in the US, the UN contemplating making blasphemy a crime, and the UK apparently drawing the line against freedom of speech, the world could be a very different place, very soon.

Charlie, although I know that religion and state can and do clash, the cynical part of me has to wonder whether religion is the driving factor or a convenient excuse when a representitive of one of the richest oil producing nations on the planet forbids followers abroad from using cheap alternatives to oil. I'm thinking less about the handful of people using this technology at the moment and more about talented research students working on advancing the technology who may now withdraw from their research.

I wonder how many of these decisions we chalk up as religious actually have more sinister ulterior motives, actually. We might scoff at the US stance on stem cell use but we can't attack their reasoning without attacking their religious beliefs, but what if the real reason was something like protecting their world leading pharmaceutical industry from technologies which might cure conditions and take away customers? If somewhere like China suddenly became the pharmaceutical world leader, would we see a volte-face from the US?

Okay, I'm starting to sound like an internet conspiracy nut now, and I don't mean to present any of this as fact or even opinion, just idle speculation, but it does seem religion can be a very convenient shield for some otherwise morally dubious decisions, and I wonder if that might be the pandora's box that leads to greater actual religious influence in politics in the future.

While I don't think I'm going to survive the 21st century, I do hope the human race does - this is of course biased of me because my daughter is young enough that living to at least the near vicinity of the end of the century is reasonably possible for her.

cod3fr3ak @6: nothing was wrong with the bed -- but it was only delivered three hours ago and we only finished building it half an hour hence!

Emotional maturity: I tend to figure that coming to terms with the inevitability of your own demise is one of the symptoms of real adulthood. (You don't have to welcome it, or even be terribly accepting: but the second law of thermodynamics is going to get us all in the end.) Once you've taken that on board, real long-term thinking becomes possible.

NB: in much the same way as my rant against space colonization here was to some extent brainstorming for "Saturn's Children" (a novel, ironically, set in a colonized future solar system) you may take this as some brainstorming-aloud about the world of "419" (the novel I'm due to start work on any month now).

The answer to the first question vastly outweighs the relevance of the remaining questions. Technological civilization as we know it can't function without a stable climate and cheap(ish) access to resources. Knock out the climate and our resource base and civilization as we know it is over.

With economic collapse in full swing across much of the planet, the prospects of dealing with peak (fill in the blank) and climate change are rapidly approaching zero as nobody has enough of an economic surplus to tackle these issues early enough to make any difference. By the time the financial system is restabilized, we'll get whacked by either climate change, peak resources, or most likely both, and be in no position to recover.

My gut feeling is that the apparent/relative prosperity experienced in the developed world until early 2008 isn't coming back within the lifetime of anyone alive to read this, and possibly not ever. The only question is how far down things will go and if "a comfortable, long and pleasant life" is a realistic prospect.

Delinear @14 - Yep. People find moral justifications for profit-driven decisions all the time. I'm sure Dubya's religious beliefs played a role in the stem cell decision, but the pharmaceutical companies have no desire to see their markets vanish in a puff of cures. 'Follow the money' only becomes conspiracy-thinking when all your perceived money-trails lead to the same group.

Firstly, money as it exists today is an imaginary fluid: value attaches to whatever we consider valuable. Minerals and manufactured goods are worth money, but so are software and energy and intangibles like music. Switching from a petrochemical energy infrastructure to a sustainable or nuclear energy infrastructure is going to be horrendously expensive ... but the flipside of the cost is that money will be going into pockets and circulating, and a lot of people will get rich from the transition. Just as we don't feel the lack of steam locomotive construction in factories (because our factories produce other goods these days), we will (assuming we get the chance to remodel our energy infrastructure) eventually not miss the old ways (or feel poorer for their absence, which is the important bit).

Ditto building new cities and new housing and migrating to avoid the worst side-effects of climate change.

Second point: with sufficient energy, you can recycle just about anything. Energy, not resource depletion, is the biggest issue we face. Want lead? Mine car batteries. Want iron? Mine old automobiles. Want phosphate fertilizer? Either figure out a biotechnology for making the stuff in bulk, or brute-force it. We're not short of mineral resources -- we're only short of mineral resources that are energetically cheap to extract.

You may think things look bad right now. But things looked this bad -- or worse -- back in 1930. The depression was a bad memory only two decades later. I'm hoping we weather the current economic shit-storm that well or better.

Quote: a surprisingly high proportion of US federal law originates as a result of WTO treaty processes

There's a reason for this. If the Corptocracy can get a treaty built in secret (see ACTA), they can essentially bypass the legislature with a pre-written law that the US is then obliged to ratify "because it's an international treaty" and the peons the treaty rips off aren't even going to have a chance to oppose it.

Charlie@18
I know. I think that's the problem. We are adults in body, but not socially. I guess some of us are more or less. But as a species we are still in the Terrible 2's stage, and lack the maturity to deal realistically with pressing issues - at least until that are thrust right in our faces.

delinear@14
I think you are right that there are always ulterior motives behind we we do. I think the difference is execution. I also think there is a nihilist component to some human endeavors. Such that it is easier for some to self-destruct (not talk about suicide bombers, but cultures) rather than change. I think that for some once the pattern of "how its supposed to be" is laid in their minds, it becomes very painful to change. In some I imagine it is actually pain similar to the loss of a loved one or a betrayal. This pain, or the avoidance of it seems to cause some folks to cut off their noses to spite their faces.

#21: I don't dispute anything you say about economic retooling[1] and the power of energy-intensive resource extraction. What I doubt is that we have enough time and political capacity to retool the first world before we run headlong into hard climate, energy and/or resource constraints that are only survivable if retooling has already happened.

Civilization will only survive e.g. the Saudi oil fields running dry if alternate energy sources are able to step up as Saudi oil steps down. Alternate energy sources are only going to happen soon enough to prevent catastrophe if there's a) a strong political will, or an immediate economic need, to make them happen and b) enough of an economic surplus available to fund R&D followed by industrialization. Part A certainly doesn't exist at the moment; the incipient global depression puts into serious question the prospects of part B on a timescale short enough to matter.

In short, we can eventually retool to cope with pretty much anything short of an existential threat to our survival of a species. But I have serious doubts we can retool fast enough to make a difference to anyone alive today.

[1] There's a formal phrase for what you're describing but I can't remember it right now.

Curmudgeon # 24- given that we start hitting all sorts of resource problems over the next 20 years, and coincidentally have lots of interesting technology already or under development, I say that we could re-tool fast enough to make a difference to most readers of this blog under the age of 60. Of course we need to start now, and some baby steps have been taken, but wasting hundreds of billions of resource coupons on the financial system will get in the way of this, as well as the usual "I wanna do what I want" attitude that is so common.

If it continues at the current pace, then some time after 2100 the human population will tend towards the condition of the UK — in which roughly 99% of the population live in cities or suburbia.

Let's not forget than an expected event which fails to come to pass is as much a Black Swan as an unexpected event that occurs.

Why yes, I have been reading Taleb's book. I have reservations, that I want to think about but he makes a lot of sense. You can imagine how pleased I was to discover most of what I learned for actuarial exams was indeed a waste of time (and not just because I kept failing them).

Urbanisation, yes, but how much of this is "real" urbanisation, and not sub-urbanisation? A lot of heating energy, work for infrastructure, traffic, communication, plumbing etc. is wasted in those low density settlements that do count as "urban". Not to mention the fact that they are built on the most fertile soils the country (any country!) has to offer, because historically all cities were built where agriculture was easiest. Creating high density living spaces that still conform to human needs would probably help a lot with that too. (It will probably emerge first from Dhaka, if anywhere.)

The real cities themselves are a kind of capital that doesn't just go away. (Unlike the air-conditioned cardboard boxes Americans tend to call "house".) Adam Smith said that a well maintained house can last for centuries and this is still true. (Add insulation, stir, move back in.) It's a pity that so much has gone to ruin for lack of maintenance during the last few decades of short-term-profit-over-long-term-growth.

Another kind of capital that you already mentioned are the huge amounts of steel and especially aluminum that have been produced from their ores. By comparison, they require much less energy to be reused than making them from scratch even with the most accessible sources of ores. Unfortunately this is not true for phosphorus. But there too a replacement source will be found. Probably including use of human and animal excrements.

Last one: "99.999% of the human species [...] will never get off the planet"

True. But I trust the founder effect to make sure that those few thousands people will prove to be a valuable subset of the species that can create new views and ideas that they could not have created without being stuck far away and no easy way out. That is, if the vile offspring doesn't get them first.

(The former assumes that there will be groups of about 100-200 individuals leaving earth and being in one place for some time - roughly the size of an ancient Greek deme, the smallest political entity above the family and below the state, which I'm kind of using as a social yardstick here.)

Charlie @ 21: That's roughly the way I see things. Given that some form of technic civilization survives the 21st century, the rest of the FAQ answers revolve around which institutions survive the economic and social upheavals of the next couple of decades, which ones survive but are massively changed, and which ones go into the hopper.

My guess is that the commercial corporation, as currently constituted, will be greatly changed, if for no other reason than Darwinian elimination of organizations that can't do any sort of long-term planning. Governments will clearly have to change: most of them in the first world have been predicated on the privileged classes living outside the high-concentration urban areas, with the lower classes pushed into them. We're already starting to see that change, and government will have to change to match. Developing and 3rd world governments will have to deal with the festering slums that have built up around the cities if they don't want to deal with major epidemics/pandemics. And if they don't deal, they won't survive.

Oh, and about that Singularity. To understand why it won't happen the way capital-S Singularitarians say it will, just consider this paraphrase of William Gibson: "The Singularity is already here, it's just unequally distributed." Which, come down to it, is a good explanation of a lot of problems; just replace "Singularity" with any other economic, social, or technical issue.

Adam @25: the key point that a lot of singularitarian wannabes don't get is that the singularity isn't about us -- it's about the AIs, or IAs, or whatever comes into existence. If we're lucky, they'll ignore us. If we're really, insanely, winning-the-lottery lucky, they'll solve our problems (just like we solve the problems our pet dogs and cats face). If we're un-lucky ...

tp1024: the average house in the UK is 75 years old, I'm told. My flat was built in 1829; I doubt I'll be here for its bicentennial in 20 years (there's no elevator, no way to install one, and I'm up too many stairs for sixty-something knee joints), but it's worth thinking about.

I'm not going to touch the space colonization bait with a barge-pole. Let's just say, I think the minimum critical mass for a self-supporting modern society is going to be somewhere north of a million people with on the order of ten thousand specialities -- and an extraterrestrial colony that depends on Earth for its problem-solving brains is between a rock and a hard place: if we lose interest, they die.

Kevin: forget biological evolution. It's not going to save you, or me -- as individuals we're the units within which the selfish genes play out their iterated games.

In any event, the effects of genetic drift are slow and clearly outstripped by the speed of cultural and technological change.

Our technosphere appears to be evolving (because its replicators are ideas, not physical ribonucleide polymers) and our extended phenotype shows some signs of feeding back into both our physical instantiations and our genome (via medical intervention and, eventually, gene therapy). But I see no obvious reasons why we're likely to undergo fundamental change in the forseeable future. We're a stable hardware platform for memetic competition; why mess with the hardware when the software is so flexible?

Re: the Singularity issue - it's not just that, in case of a "happy" singularity, it will be unequally distributed, it's also about the fact that many, if not most people would not want it. I've talked with my girlfriend about it, and while I'd be happy to get uploaded at some point (after a long and enjoyable squishy-body life), for her it was a horrible idea she would never agree to. Now, she's a well educated intelligent woman - just think of the brazillion poorly educated souls being offered to "move into the computer". Somehow, I think Singularity Sky kind of nailed that one.

Transhumanism and the singularity are geek-culture gone mad, and geek-culture accounts for... What? Maybe one-millionth of the human popuation. It's a Western middle-class form of fetishism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetishism), the idea that the right gadgets will let you live forever in a perfect utopia. And the idea that this tiny sub-population of humanity will set the agenda for the rest of humanity for the rest of history is just plain silly.

Given that we're in the middle of a global economic firestorm that's reshaping the way we think about globalism (The economic basis of the Western tech-obsessed middle-class), I doubt these technofetishists will have the clout to set the agenda for next week let alone the next century.

One of the problems our pets face is fecundity. All of my pets are neutered. To me, it's an obvious and best solution. My pets might not agree. I shudder to think about what some of the best solutions for human problems might be.

@34: Unequal distribution also affects the unhappy scenarios. One of the worst cases I've heard of is from Charlie's story Antibodies: a hard takeoff in which one AI wakes up with all the computers in the world as its body. Note that Charlie had to assume some results in math and CS theory that are rather strongly doubted to make that happen. Even in a hard takeoff what's much more likely is one or more AI consciousnesses localized in some local or organization intranet. No matter how smart it or they may be, they still have to deal with a numerically superior surrounding humanity. To see how that might go, read "HARLIE is One" by David Gerrold. Hint: you can catch flies better with honey ...

Mormons are about to overtake Jews in America; in fact, they may already have done so. And they almost had their own presidential candidate, in the person of Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts. The rapid rise of Mormons in America, growing by an average of 40% every decade in the 20th century, is mainly due to their large families. The American state with the highest birth rate is Utah, which is around 70% Mormon.... Ultra-Orthodox Jews, however, do have plenty of offspring. This fact is changing the face of Israel, where such families have three times more children than other Israelis. As a result, at least a quarter of Israel's population of under-17s is expected to be ultra-Orthodox by 2025. Europe to become markedly more religious in the course of the 21st century, as a result of the relatively low fertility of unbelievers and immigration from more pious places. Not only do denominations with traditionalist values tend to have higher birth rates than their more liberal co-religionists, but countries that are relatively secularised usually reproduce more slowly than countries that are more religious. According to the World Bank, the nations with the largest proportions of unbelievers had an average annual population growth rate of just 0.7% in the period 1975-97, while the populations of the most religious countries grew three times as fast.

Sophisticated, urbane, secular types simply don't breed as much as Fundamentlists of any kind of religion. Without carriers, the secular meme will die out. Evolution will self select for coservative religious types.

You know, it just occurred to me that one survival strategy for a superhuman AI at significant disadvantage in military and industrial power to the human race might be to hide, posing as a bunch of spammers and conmen. A really effective scam set up by a posthuman entity could fund a great deal of hardening of hardware and buying off of regional law enforcement and legal systems to make its situation less threatening. Of course, it might pose as a bad Nigerian scammer to throw off our suspicions.

@38: there are more World of Warcraft players in the USA than there are farmers and farm workers.

(Yes. I'm talking about millions.)

I'd put the geek population in the developed world at somewhere around 0.5-5% of population. In other words, a small minority ... of millions.

doowop @39: your model is flawed because it fails to take into account the fact that fundamentalists convert to secularism far more often than secularists convert to fundamentalism. Faith communities insulate against this to some extent by raising the cost of defection to an unacceptably high level (cf. the muslim law against apostasy -- carries the death penalty in some parts -- or simple social shunning in other groups) but it's hard to keep them down on the farm when they can see the bright city lights on the screen of their netbook.

With the exception of the US, the "most religious" countries are mostly developing ones. As they develop they undergo demographic transition to steady state/aging/declining population, and the religiosity falls off. Ever wondered why?

Even in the USA, a country noteworthy for its sense of exclusive legislative independence, a surprisingly high proportion of US federal law originates as a result of WTO treaty processes.

Which doesn't even touch the fact that most of the rules individual Americans follow are largely determined by their employer - which is a huge corporation around 85% of the time. What you wear, when you wear it, where you'll be and increasingly even what you do when you're no longer at work is determined by the company you work for. It might be positively 20th century of me to be still worried about this, but to my eyes the biggest element of government in a person's life is the company they work for - it determined a great deal of what they do, how they do it, and why. Far more than any modern government.

said:

The argument I've been making is that it's patently unfair for governments to operate with geographic monopolies. What if I like my neighborhood, but not my government? Why should I subscribe to their laws?

Because other people exist. And they exist in space. I feel the fact of proximity means that we're going to have to get along with people pretty geographically until we're not, y'know, geographical any more. Your neighborhood exists within a specific physical context, and so do countries like Sweden (what makes you think Sweden WANTS to provide health services to your neighborhood or even could provide such services?).

I kinna like the anarcho-syndicalist idea of all neighborhoods having their own little laws and charters (or lack of laws and charters) but it's one of those things I've never seen any actual material plan for. Y'know, how it's actually work in time and space.

Doowop @ 39: Charlie beat me to the punch, but he's got it right. Anecdotally, I've seen a lot more folks walking away from these conservative sects than joining them, especially once they've had a taste of the life denied them.

And while memes do pass through families, they also spread through communication - books, TV, internet, etc.

Re: religious beliefs on the public stage: Our city council just voted to endorse Virginia's law-in-legislature that would increase "health safety and sanitation" at VA abortion clinics. You know what that means. And we have one of the very few abortion clinics in the state.

Cannonball @5, if criticizing religion was a crime, a lot of people would be in trouble.

delinear @9, I don't know if you know what Virginia looks like, but we have a southwest end that is in small mountains. For years the primary jobs there have been coal, and now many towns are closing down because the young folk are going away and the old folk are dying.

Oh, and here in Sweden the Pirate party is soon the fifth or so largest party if you just count signed up members! And its youth organization is the second largest political youth organization in Sweden! So, the question of privacy in the future may indeed create new political movements, and it all may start here in Sweden!

A: No — in the long run, we are all dead. That goes for us as individuals and as a species. On the other hand, I hope to have a comfortable, long and pleasant life first, and I wish you the same!
[/i]

Individuals, yes.

Species, well we have at least several billion years to figure out a way round the heat-death/contraction of the universe. I wouldn't make a definite statemente either way, it's just too long a time-period and we don't know enough.

With all the stuff going on "adapt and survive" is going to be the mantra for at least the next century (and it is already), for individuals, industies and nations.

@38 & @41... Not every WoW player is a geek, and not every geek is part of the "geek-culture gone mad" subset that I specifically referred to. How many people actually contribute significant time and money to H+ organizations?

The World Transhumanist Organization claims 5551 members worldwide, but membership is free. Sustaining membership is $250 per year, and they list only 33 sustaining members on their website. Even assuming only a small group of sustaining members want to be listed, that's not a lot of people involved with this group.

h+ magazine is a quarterly. Having worked in several parts of the magazine industry, I can tell you that quarterly means not a lot of subscribers and advertisers.

It's a trite and bitter sentiment to voice on the first post to a blog I enjoy reading, but the only thing I'm reasonably certain of about the year 2109 is that it will feature a number of very cultivated, very articulate people looking at our philosophical progeny and going "Look. A few more years, and all those dipshits will have outbred us completely."

Kevin, I wouldn't point to Bangladesh as an example of enlightened female leadership if I were you. The two begums have been battling it out for decades, and are as much as anythiing proof that gender is no barrier to corrupt personality cults. (Alas.)

Resource depletion is an issue of concentration, not an issue of loss; nothing goes away, there is no away. (conservation of mass! Why is it so extremely difficult to believe in concentration of mass?)

Phosphate fertilizers are probably not the best solution at present tech level; certainly not once biotech (which is having something like its own Moore's Law progression) gets going.

The fundamental difficulty is not, and only very rarely is, technical. The usual difficulty is organizational; the folks who derive benefit from the current dominant way of doing things wish it to continue even when it is obvious that it is necessary to change.

This generally drives authoritarian responses to the necessity of change; this is precisely the wrong way around, but getting most humans to willingly surrender relative status is really difficult.

Figuring out how to change organizational structures before the catastrophe imposes do-or-die levels of necessity is (I think) the great challenge of the 21st century. Or adopt something really general as an organizational structure, and accept the lack of optimality in return for robustness. See post-heptarchy Wessex for a successful example. But that approach has pretty strong temporal and cultural scope limits; it's probably best to combine them.

I can even see ways in which people believe in a kind of quantitied-problem-solving meta-stability, but my notions of general comfort and belief are not entirely reliable.

We already have religious zealots writing major laws institutionalizing their insane taboos -- they are called environmentalists. Witness that corrupt schmuck Obama's plan for a new carbon tax to raise energy prices and impoverish the middle class. Nice one Barack, way to look out for the citizenry.

24: Sorry, old chap, but capitalism has the nifty feature of giving us resilience to Saudi oil fields and other resource failure. Civ won't fail, running cars/trucks will just get expensive,slowly, as it gets harder to pump oil from more and more remote parts of fields - yeah, I know, BORING. What will we put into our tanks? My bet's on...oil, the renewable kind, made from trash (dev's in round 2 now), or possibly biodiesel. Of course, we won't much renewable oil use, because it's more expensive, until that oil price curve gets far enough to be equally expensive.

28: I know - it's the opposite of what the schoolbooks tell you, but high density is EXPENSIVE, resource-intensive in every way. Big buildings take alot of underground support infrastructure that's resource- labor- and energy-intensive. You can see a reflection of that fact in the fact that upper stories always go up much faster than basements/foundations. So you're wrong to sneer about burbs on resources. I realized that fact after I found there was a 50%/ft^2 tariff on getting rid of our backyard and going condo, and gave up.

31: No idea how we'll evolve, but people are already (at the high price and difficulty that early adopters always face) debugging their genes by using PGD to filter against some nasty genes in babies.

Kevin @ 52 Thanks for the pointer, but I actually tried to say that the cry of cultural pessimists as we see it in here has always been around, and never was correct.

The whole idea of 'stupid outbreeding smart' in all its variations is patently false. A), because high intelligence in the parents does not guarantee high intelligence in the children and nor is the reverse true, B), because the concept entirely relies on a complete lack of memetic cross-spread, and C), because it assumes an absolute superiority of one culture over another - which is arrogant in the extreme. Sure, I don't agree with some of the opinions my religious acquintances have, but they are not all morons.

@58: Big buildings take a lot of underground support infrastructure that's resource- labor- and energy-intensive

It is, but only once. The dutch are currently building a railway tunnel under Amsterdam. The greatest concern? Not to damage the century old foundations of the buildings there.

Building a foundation once every couple centuries is much more energy efficient than heating too much every night, commuting too much every day and pumping water through too long too thin plumbing all the time.

Yes, it requires investment, but it's the sort of investment that won't go away in the next stock market crash. (Whereas you'll see a lot of cardboard boxes vanishing in the suburbs, leaving behind a skeleton of roads, thin concrete slaps and powerline poles.)

Jim @58: thank you for supplying the example that proves Graydon @57's point. (And I'll thank you to switch off the ad hominem political attacks right now if you want to stick around.)

Jon @59: who needs skyscrapers to have high density living? I live in a city that had some of the first 10 and 12 story buildings in the world -- pre-lift, pre-indoor-plumbing -- as residential apartments. They're made out of stone, by human labour, and are still in use several centuries later (retrofitted with lifts and plumbing and other modern conveniences).

One of the besetting problems the United States faces is infrastructure quality that is, frankly, shit. Houses that are cardboard boxes in places that are only inhabitable due to air conditioning and cheap petrol-powered vehicles. If you built houses to last 300 years rather than 30, they'd cost more in the short term ... but in the long term, they'd be a whole lot cheaper.

Trey and Mr. Stross - conversion from fundamentalism to secularism may exceed the reverse, but it is still miniscule compared to the higher Fundy birth rate. The net result is Fundies will still out number seculars, and the gap will continue to increase. To my mind, the real question is why are Seculars so sterile? Why don't Seculars have large families like Mormons, Orthodix Jews or Muslims? Any child free seculars out there like to provide an explanation?

The article deals with religious demographics and especially New Religious Movements (NRMs). The introduction sums up the article's main theme nicely:

"Religion didn't begin to wither away during the twentieth century, as some academic experts had prophesied. Far from it. And the new century will probably see religion explode-in both intensity and variety. New religions are springing up everywhere. Old ones are mutating with Darwinian restlessness. And the big "problem religion" of the twenty-first century may not be the one you think." And from the article:

"The essence of the idea is this: People act rationally in choosing their religion. If they are believers, they make a constant cost-benefit analysis, consciously or unconsciously, about what form of religion to practice. Religious beliefs and practices make up the product that is on sale in the market, and current and potential followers are the consumers. In a free-market religious economy there is a healthy abundance of choice (religious pluralism), which leads naturally to vigorous competition and efficient supply (new and old religious movements). The more competition there is, the higher the level of consumption. This would explain the often remarked paradox that the United States is one of the most religious countries in the world but also one of the strongest enforcers of a separation between Church and State."

This is a rather intersting idea: that religious belief should be categorized like any other consumer market. Believers make rational "puchases" of religious "products and services" which meet their current emotional and psychic "needs and wants". This implies that the traditional state supported religions (e.g. the Church of England) are essentially no different than the old state run economies of the former Warsaw Pact - and just as lacking in choices and products to meet consumer needs. Perhaps this explains why western Europe (especially compared to the US) is spiritually moribund. Apparently Westminister and Chartres are as bad at meeting the needs of their "consumers" as the old GUM department store in Moscow. Like the former East Block, western Europe also has its religious equivalent of the black market - newly arrived relgious movements like Mormonism and Islam or locally derived non-Abrahamic religions like neo-paganism and druidism.

Religion in the US (without a state supported official religion) is "free market". Religion in Europe (with official state religions in almost every country) is "socialistic". The first is vibrant and growing, the second is stagnant and dying. Fundies in America should get down on their knees and thank God for that separation of Church and State.

Case in point: the established state religions don't, for the most part, receive active state support, and haven't for decades. (There are exceptions such as Greece, Italy, and Poland, but that just highlights the difficulty of making sweeping generalizations about 500 million people.) There is a "free market" in faith in most parts, insofar as people are free to convert and rival religions flourish. But levels of overt agnosticism and atheism are an order of magnitude higher in, for example, the UK or Czech republic than they are in the US -- and they're rising rapidly with a generational turnover; according to the 2000 UK census, only about 20% of under-25s actually believe in some kind of deity, while around 60% are overtly atheist or agnostic. (You can invert those figures for the over-65s.)

But I'd dispute the whole "free market" and "rational actor" hypothesis anyway. It's discredited in economics and it's just plain stupid to apply it to human social organizations. We're a social species, and membership of a religious community doesn't simply correlate with belief, it correlates with membership of a social organization: if you change your church you're going to lose friends and associates. Change your entire religion and it's quite likely that most of the people you know will view you as a traitor or apostate and refuse to talk to you. There is therefore a quite considerable cost associated with changing.

As for the "black market" analogy, I don't see the police hereabouts raiding druid circles and arresting the members for subverting the state religion -- which is what would be happening if there really was an enforced state religion. (If you want to see that happening today, look to Iran and the status of the Ba'hai or Zoroastrian or other minority religions.)

Well I'd love to hear your explanation as to why America is far more religious than Europe.

Also, I'd like to hear why exactly Seculars have few if any offspring.

Again, not to be rude, but free markets have been "discredited" only by those who adhere to Left wing ideologies. The concept is alive and well on this side of the Atlantic.

Also, given your lack of response to my first point, can I assume that you concur that the NET growth of Fundies (massive birth rate less tiny conversion to secularism) is still much greater than the growth rate of Seculars?

In short: religiosity is slowly falling in the US, and has been throughout the 20th century. Increasing vocalism and the growth of megachurches is a consolidation and advertising, but not actual growth. Be careful of there you get your statistics: I now declare myself to be an "Athiest" rather than "Agnostic" because so many use statistics such as the WCE (World Council of Churches): look at the fine print and they list anyone who does not actively deny the existence of a God (eg Agnostics!) as a believer.

Secularists (materialists) have less offspring as they are no longer required to support you in your old age.

Religion in the US is built on a very insecure base: as a society the US promotes mobility, when people move into a new neighbourhood about the only community organisations that actively seek out new members are the churches. This is much less so in Europe, as the less "free market" churches have other support mechanisms. We see this in Ireland: with a large influx of immigrants during the celtic tiger period, there is a rapid growth in evangelistic churches. The established churches are slower to proselytize, all rhetoric to the contrary: the catholic church in Ireland doesn't see its existence at stake if it fails to attract Nigerian immigrants, for example.
Ditto there are few social organisations actively seeking immigrant members: welcoming those who come along, maybe, but not actively recruiting.

This means, especially in the US where your material security is less firm (it only takes a serious illness and un-cooperative HMO to wipe out your family finances) the churches become a backbone. But people are actively trying to become more materially secure, and undermining the need for that support. To the extent that as people become more materially secure, they become less religious.

Looked globally, over a century timescale, its been the small, pagan religions around the world that have lost out big-time, and secularism / atheism has grown from essentially nothing to 1-2 billion "adherents".

All these UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS change the big picture so radically than ANY OF YOUR OTHER SITUATIONAL CONCLUSIONS CAN BE DOUBTED, such as about urban-suburban balance, resources and climate, mortality and existential risks, and even (yes!) the percent of affected by Singularity:) So you actually write about nothing? "God knows what will happen", yes?

The Singularity is not a distinct event of "rupture". You are talking about YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF SINGULARITY, nothing more. The real Singularity is a CONCEPT of UNPREDICTABILITY of what will happen in N years FROM TODAY'S POSITION. It's the event horizon, not an event.

We are facing the equivalent of 100 past years in just 20 future years, then the equivalent of 1000 past years in the next 20 years, then even more. What could an individual predict about today 1000 years ago? How could he describe today's social realities in terms of his time? And how about explaining the current situation to someone from Stone Age? Better forget about it - and re-read Kurzweil's books. I'd rather believe that guy, whose many predictions already became reality and who also makes some real inventions, than anyone who thinks religious superstitions are forever and geeks are not. All the history of humanity tells us the opposite: geeks win, retrogrades lose. In 21st century we will see this process accelerated.

In 19th century the famous Russian chemist Mendeleev thought that the main problem of 20th century will be... cleaning streets of cities from horse manure. The only introducing of automobile made fun of this. So if even leading scientists can't see all the details... what should we expect?

The answer is: forget about details. Get to a higher level, study general properties of Big History (including the Evolution) before making any serious conclusions about this or that religion etc. And, see you in 2100!

Vx: Kurzweil is a derivative thinker. Most of his ideas were common currency in extropian circles in the early 90s; he just successfully popularized them. I rate him as being a publicity hound rather than a pioneer, and I tend to assume that people who think he's got something useful to say aren't familiar with the original sources he strip-mined. (Bitter? Moi?)

doowop @ 67 & 69: What exactly do you mean when you say "fundamentalist"?
In my corner, the term is generally understood to mean a person or group intent on making their religion's tenets binding for the wider society. Reading your posts, I am getting the impression that you're using the term to describe either all, or all conservative religious people. Which would denote a much larger and much less socially aggressive group.

1. US history appears to show a pattern of periods of political insurgency by groups emerging out of evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity, followed by periods when those groups decide the game's not worth the candle and drop out of the running (that's where the Jehovah's Witnesses come from, and why they don't recognise governments, allow their members to vote, etc.)

2. In the case of Ireland, mentioned by Alastair McKinstry above, some of the African immigrant communities have imported the 'modern evangelical' style of worship, but some of those communities have simply joined up with old Protestant churches, or have been Catholic anyway - like the Polish immigrants. And while some of the latter have been head-the-ball fundies, while others are relatively sane Vatican 2 types.

3. That said, Ratzinger, like Wojtyla before him, is making every effort to bury Vatican 2 and return to the good old days when the faithful knew their place. And there are still groups in Ireland who are not only 'Faith and Fatherland' but also 'Blood and Soil'. They're still very marginal indeed, but with the Celtic tiger's 'controlled flight into terrain' they might gain more support. They won't be able to seize state power, however, as the clock can't be wound back to when Ireland was a republic of small peasant farmers.

Charlie @ 60:
The city I work in (New Haven) has an even higher population density than Edinburgh, and it does it without very many skyscrapers. There are really only 3 residential buildings I can think of that are over 10 stories, the rest of the skyscrapers are offices. Most of the residential spaces are multifamily homes -- converted Victorian houses that have been turned into apartments for 3-4 families. There are also a number of 4-5 story buildings with a couple dozen apartments in them. Single family homes are along the outskirts of the city, before you get into the suburbs.

This gives it a density that's 3x higher than the newer city I used to live in - Orlando. And without a need for many high rise buildings. This is probably a result of the way New England was settled -- it was finished being settled before steam power came along even, and the town boundaries were drawn so that you were no more than an hour's carriage ride from the town center so you could go to town meetings and church without trouble. It was the first region to industrialize as well, thanks to the rivers, so the old industrial cities and towns have a lot of buildings dating from the 19th century that were built to last. Sadly, a lot were torn down in the 60s as part of urban renewal and the architectural prejudices of the period. Now were in the position of tearing down buildings built in the 60s because they have deteriorated far faster than the buildings they replaced...

Also, I wouldn't knock air conditioning. Given the climate of the US, we use far more energy heating buildings than we do cooling them. It would be better for the carbon footprint of the US if we all abandoned the Northeast and moved to the South and Southwest.

As for the question of why secularists breed in less numbers. I can only relate to myself. At 32 I am just starting work on a family, since the first part of my adult life I was in school and the Navy learning a skill, I really did not feel that I had the time or resources to start a family SUCCESSFULLY. it wasn't that I could do it, but I could easily see how folks around me were struggling to eat, and felt I could do better for my kids. Now my wife and I are totally blown away when we seek folks on TV (mainly from the Heartland, sometimes unskilled and poor) having 5 and 6 kids. the mill closes and suddenly things are looking dire. I mean if things are tight at 2 kids, why have the 3rd or 4th, or 5th (which has downs syndrome and needs special care)?
From what I can see there is a combination of two things, ignorance and faith. Ignorance of human sexual function and modern birth control advances. And faith that some deity is going to "make a way" for you to survive.

#76: What will happen to Ireland post Celtic Tiger is very strange territory. With the influx of immigrants, and secularisation of "old Ireland", easily half the religious are immigrants. So much for "Faith and fatherland". As for "Blood and Soil", again the influx is not just to the cities, but as cheap agricultural labour, and there has been a huge drop-off in farmers: local farms have heavy influxes of Brazilians, for example. I live 15 km from Galway, far enough for there to be a community to be semi-rural. Its interesting to look at a rural community and realize less than 1 in 20 are farmers. Ireland has tried to maintain a 'rural' bias, even though half the population now lives in Dublin. Its worth thinking about what it means to be "rural" in an area where there are more academics and scientists than farmers ...

As for the US, notice that the tide has been turning against religious power. Look at where the Xian right did _not_ get: the last of the Bush years saw the disillusionment of the Xian right where they saw they were being used by Rove et al, and not getting there plans enacted. And thats assuming they stay coherent, which is not a given.

There was a major upwelling in support for small millenarian groups in the 1930s depression, aided by the dust bowl catastophe: sects such as the Branch Davidians believing that the world was ending Friday. Perhaps that may repeat, with climate change disasters? But these were small groups; they haven't, and won't (by sentiment) get involved in politics.

The Mormons, though, are an interesting different case. Their gospels were almost, ahem, 'designed' to be friendly to secular power: a good defence mechanism for a small wierd sect. They believe a good state power is a good thing, for policing, etc: so much so that when Hoover created the FBI they rushed to join it. But they are too biased towards the FBI to be a good conspiracy for taking over the US; they have little representation elsewhere in government, and are despised by the CIA, etc. Mitt Romney in the White House would gain the Mormons little beyond prestige.

Charlie @66: No, I just didn't state my point clearly. The h+/extropian/transhumanist types are a subset of geek culture - A tiny subset.

Doowop @69: "Again, not to be rude, but free markets have been "discredited" only by those who adhere to Left wing ideologies. The concept is alive and well on this side of the Atlantic."

No, sorry. The free market ideology on this side of the Atlantic is f---ed. And contrary to your pre-emptive ad hominem attack, I'm not a left wing ideologue. The markets are discredited because the banks are insolvent, the stock market is bleeding cash, real estate prices are tanking - And the economists and regulators spent years telling everyone that this couldn't happen. The people in charge said that we had managed away risk, the markets were fundamentally strong and stable, and that we had entered the era of the Great Moderation.

When the financial institutions are only alive because the government is pumping billions of dollars into them, it is no longer a free market.

If put on the spot, I'd suggest that fundamentalists tend to get married and start families younger than moderate religious followers and secularists. I'd probably say something about mariage being part of attaining full adult status in fundie communities, whereas secular culture puts more emphasis on career and money to determine status.

While we're at it, I'd make some assertions about the larger and more mainstream the religion is or becomes, the more it has to follow societal trends, thus peeling off fundie sects who say "this is too much". See for example the ongoing conflict in the Anglican/Episcopalian Church over female priests and bishops and over homosexuality leading to some followers to convert to Catholicism, and others to join evangalical churches.

Vx:The real Singularity is a CONCEPT of UNPREDICTABILITY of what will happen in N years FROM TODAY'S POSITION.... We are facing the equivalent of 100 past years in just 20 future years, then the equivalent of 1000 past years in the next 20 years, then even more.

You're making a prediction about future unpredictability of events. Don't forget to be prepared to be proved wrong. (I don't necessarily disagree, but if you're expecting an accelerating rate of change and it doesn't occur, that's just as much a Black Swan)

Related to rural/urban living this recent post on Strange Maps shows the geographical locations that non-Parisians settled in Paris c.1920 along with a couple of notes of how rural France became centralised and homogenised.

ian @ 82, doowop @ 69:
And with the failure of free market economics to predict, prevent, or control the current auguring-in of the financial system, the previous high-priesthood, e.g., Greenspan, are wringing their hands in public and admitting that there is far more in heaven and Wall Street than was dreamt of in their philosophy.

Alastair McKinstry @ 81:small millenarian groups ? Does this meant the current Depression will bring forth groups of Mad Hatters?

Yep. Millenarian in this sense means the Christian "doctrine of the millenium", originally after those tho thought in 999 AD that the end of the world is nigh ...

In the disastrous 1930s many such groups like the Branch Davidians sprung up. They weren't / aren't a suicidal cult created by David Koresh: that was just spin planted to justify Waco. Despite the number of days that have passed since then, they continue to believe the world is just about to end, though the groups are slowly dying out as their followers do so (I have distant relatives in such a group, who emigrated to the states in the 1940s. Strange beliefs).

On the whole "free market" shebang - was I the only one who had to read about Akerlof and the market for lemons in Econ 101? The need for regulation has been an accepted aspect of economic theory for quite some time.

@59 Your comments about the cost of building high density have been ably refuted, but there's another aspect to consider.

When you build dense then a host of other sustainable things become practical - you have the density to support a variety of retailers within walking distance, you can support a frequent public transport system, you have have schools walkable from your house, etc. etc.

Sorry - you're just going to have to accept that low density living just isn't that sustainable. Living the rural dream is great, but unless you actually live off the land you will probably have a bigger carbon footprint than living in a city

Johnny @ 91:
I think sustainability is a function of technology.
100 years ago, rural life was more eco-friendly than urban life. It might be entirely possible to have a suburban or rural density population that's more sustainable than urban populations today - remove pollution from energy production and use more sustainable materials and there's no reason why the impact of suburban life can't be minimal. Especially if you tailor landscaping to the region you're in. Land use could be an issue in some parts of the world. Western Europe can't support as large a suburban/rural population as North America without a negative impact on the environment.

I too am dubious about the whole 'smart/secular people being outbred by dumb/religious people' meme. As mentioned, it makes the assumption that dumb people make dumb kids, and religious people make religious kids. For one, intelligence isn't completely dependent on genetics, and if you read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers you can see raw intelligence isn't a guarantee of someone being a productive and successful member of society. People of average intelligence can often have above average success just by being at the right place at the right time. As for religion, my father was a preacher, and not a single one of his four kids is at all religious. In fact, we mostly rebelled against my father's preaching in rather obnoxious fashion.

Majority urban world: this was highly publicized at the time by the UN itself, as well as those citing it. Mr.Stross entirely correct.

Black Market: some Mathematical Economists that I know are debating/calculating the size of the Black Market in various countries. This was prompted by argument about whether USA was more than 10% black market.

Extropian/Kurzweil: agree they've always been a tiny fraction of extreme geeks, before and after Extropian organization was taken over by British/Silicon valley faction from founders. Agree that Kurzweil is a good populaizer of ideas with extensive prior art, but that's okay. My brother Nicholas is as big a fan of Kurzweil's books as Bill Gibson's. Let a thousand downloaded nanoflowers bloom.

City density: I was doing my M.S. and Ph.D. research at UMass/Amherst when they had cluster of 5 or 6 high-rise dorms (22? 25 storeys?) making largest population density in New England. Socioloists from Japan and Hong Kong and the like came to study this, as crime rate was over 10 times higher here than in rest of 30,000 student campus.

Andrew @ 92: I challenge you to show how suburban life in particular can be eco-friendly, specifically energy-efficient.

The problem is transport: sub-urban life only really became possible or desirable with cheap energy for transport. Its a method of trading transport energy (the increased distances between home / work / shops, etc) vs other desirable traits, such as playing space for kids (your lawns), security (being away from bad neighbourhoods), etc.

Rural living can be high density: see villages, with everyone living close together, surrounded by land for (farming | forestry | wilderness). An example is the German method of farmers living in a hamlet, driving out to the farm which is otherwise unoccupied (much easier for cereal crops than animals, granted). This minimises transport. Or it could be isolated houses, heavy on transport or isolation, the Irish lifestyle :-(.

Do the energy consumption numnbers for vehicles vs. the energy collected by solar or wind. There is basically no way a suburban community can generate the energy locally to offset its transport needs.

Assuming we avoid a systemic collapse, there'll probably be a moon base, by and by. Whether it's American, Chinese, Indian, or Indonesian is anybody's guess, and probably doesn't matter as far as the 99.999% of the human species who will never get off the planet are concerned. There'll probably be a Mars expedition too. But barring fundamental biomedical breakthroughs, or physics/engineering breakthroughs that play hell with the laws of physics as currently understood, canned monkeys aren't going to Jupiter any time soon, never mind colonizing the universe."

and: "Let's just say, I think the minimum critical mass for a self-supporting modern society is going to be somewhere north of a million people with on the order of ten thousand specialities -- and an extraterrestrial colony that depends on Earth for its problem-solving brains is between a rock and a hard place: if we lose interest, they die."

Let me advocate a more optimistic approach.
What exactly stops humans going into space today - answer high cost to orbit, fairly rigorous g forces. Do we need technical breakthroughs to overcome these - yes. Do we need any unknown physics - no. So colonization out to the Oort cloud doesn't need any fancy warp drives. Are there any low cost launch alternatives out there - yes. From low cost rockets to many ideas on alternatives, one even mentioned in Saturn's Children.

What about living on other planets, asteroids, space habitats? The biggest problem has been various radiations. But all these can be limited by either mass or electric fields. Thus O'Neill style colonies are possible, just extremely expensive to create.

Do we need millions of people per colony for a modern place to survive? If we succeed in making "replicators" - ie advanced versions of fab machines, then the answer is no. Is this far-fetched - I doubt it.

For humans to occupy space, it does not require that a large fraction of humanity participate, just that a number of founder populations have to get started and can be self replicating. The solar system is a big place - most of humanity could be in space within a few thousand years once the founder populations started replicating.

charlie "Are we going to survive?". If by we you mean the current modern human species - well we have just started on our evolutionary journey. Our species will eventually go extinct, but in the meantime we will likely spawn a host of successor species, some of which may be very successful. However, I would bet that our technology will make it possible for our current species to survive almost any possible competitor, even ones we spawn ourselves.

Alastair @ 95:
As you say, the problem is with transportation. It's already possible to make passively heated/cooled homes, use sustainable materials, etc, and economies of scale can only bring that cost down.

But the biggest hurdle is energy for transportation. More precisely, storing energy for transportation. If you could find a way to cheaply and quickly store energy in vehicles they could be powered by nuclear power and renewable sources.

I thought the essence of geek culture was putting up with imperfection in exchange for innovation and independence? It's the Linux Way. If I didn't care about interesting technology or freedom to innovate or monopolistic lock-in, I'd use proprietary software, take the car to a main dealer, call in Polish tradesmen for anything that breaks in my house, etc; I wouldn't be a geek. Ceteris paribus, I'd still be doing what I'm doing now, but I'd be a bellhead instead.

Meanwhile, I think Charlie's 21C is quite inviting. We've always had problems and constraints, you know. Just as love is the discipline of adapting yourself to another's pleasure, just as poets enjoy the restrictions of the sonnet or the haiku and sci-fi writers the challenge of 800 words of pulp/140 characters of twitter/whatever.

Just one more thing that I thought of walking through one really high population density area:

There are two important factors in such environments: 1) privacy and individuality 2) community.

1) privacy is mostly a given, even and maybe especially in the big buildings with lots of flats in them. individuality however usually doesn't extend beyond the interior of those flats and it is quite remarkable how much of a difference it makes to see a rather uniform block of flats on the one side and a colorful one with a holy mess of different balconies on the other. The latter really feels like there are people living in it. I really only noticed now that the expression of individuality is *not* egocentric at all, it is for the benefit of the other people to see individuals rather than a uniform mass. And oddly enough, it is the disparity of all those flats that makes you perceive them as one community rather than just a coincidental collocation of human sleeping-cells.

2) Community is probably the most often ignored factor in high density living areas. A house with 200 people or more living in it, is no longer a house. It is a village, a community. But what a poor kind of village those are. The only shared room of the whole village are the stairs. And those, by their very function, are perfectly unsuited for social interaction. Any village has a pond, a free place, an inn, a bakery, a butcher, a big tree or some other place that is quintessentially social in nature. A place where people cannot help but meet and greet. Almost everything about a block of flat is contrary to a sense of community. There are rules that limit expression of individuality (which seems to be the foundation of the necessary self-confidence to assimilate into a community) and no shared spaces. If just 10% of the living area were given to this community, maybe some kind of bar in the middle of the block and some places to just sit down, and of course the roof if in any way accessible (it should be!), a house could become a true village with a living community that is actually worth living in.

I keep thinking that it is just this missing sense of the necessity of community that is keeping high density habitation from essentially becoming broadly accepted and actually embraced instead of scorned and avoided.

Yeah, but back to the initial post...
1) I think that this 'Westphalia' concept is overblown: borders - of non Great Powers - have always been porous.
2) Zibmbabwe's not under trade sanctions: ZANU-pf have been screwing the economy without even that excuse. The sanctions are all political, ie toothless 'travel bans'.

As it happens the C21 has been worrying me so much in the last couple of months that I found Charlie's summary relatively reassuring. And it's better than The Day After.

Yeah, no FTL, no gravity control, not even much of a manned presence in space. No cheeky robots, no fabulous life-extension. No loquacious Lord Running Clams.

So what? What's being predicted is a future where most people live a sustainable first-world lifestyle. Nobody is dying because they can't afford a few dollars worth of medication. Nobody's kids are dying because of a few dollars worth of medication, or from famine.

Charlie and lp, let me tell you what people thought of new buildings when they were building the buildings you're living in: "Horrid." And they were right. Building survival's like classics in literature - the 90% that's shit's no longer with us, so you don't see it anymore. And, remember, there weren't so many building codes back then, beyond being careful not to mess up the local elites' buildings (in fact, a high fraction of surviving old buildings WERE built for the elites), and they had lower technology and less money/person. I'm quite confident my neighborhood will see less building damage and other serious trouble on a per-year, per-capita basis than yours have since your buildings' construction.

Old, high-density buildings have their own problems, of course - you have have to pay the realestate equivalent of a Windows in more overall trouble than my family does, from curved everything, more cracks, having plumbing/electricity/enet in a building not designed for it, and and living with hazards that modern codes have taken away. Except, of course, you get far more back in terms of coolness, of course than you'll ever get from Windows.

You don't need a skyscraper to see higher costs - you still need more supports, the bigger and taller a building. The construction cost calculator site I got this from breaks it down into three different categories - 1-3 stories, 4-7 stories, and 8-24 stories. And the 50% tariff was there even on a three-story, condo complex in no special location, right next to one of the city's more cost-effective house neighborhoods, meaning unless they're real dumb, they're already discounting as much as possible.

lp, isn't your subway example a counterexample to what you're saying? There is no, "we're done now, we only need to build things once." And,, isn't the subway construction knocking down some of those, er, non-cardboard buildings? I wouldn't get too arrogant about your subway and the credit market, either, unless your gummint already has ALL its bonds lined up, including whatever the overruns will be; there's delay on infrastructure all over the world.

My 'burban HOUSE is perfectly walkable (that also contradicts your point, Johnny@91), because it was a priority for us. And, Chariie, you're right about the A/C being pretty important in Austin - but, then, let's see you do without heat in Scotland.

Andrew@97: I already answered your energy point in point 58, noting that the renewable gas would be alot more expensive.

Charlie @ 66: "who needs skyscrapers to have high density living? I live in a city that had some of the first 10 and 12 story buildings in the world -- pre-lift, pre-indoor-plumbing -- as residential apartments."

Or go even further back in time, to various parts of the southwest USA, for a few other spectacularly high-rise residentialdevelopments.

The link here appears to be from a writer who is not only staunchly anti-Mugabe (and rightly so), but it also alleges that economic sanctions on Zimbabwe have triggered the hyperinflationary meltdown of the Zim economy (which has been prone to patters of speculative boom and disastrous bust since the earliest days of the Rhodesian settler colony). All this without much effect on Mugabe, who even with this 'power sharing' deal with the MDC is still very much squatting on the back of the oppressed masses. . .

If just 10% of the living area were given to this community, maybe some kind of bar in the middle of the block and some places to just sit down, and of course the roof if in any way accessible (it should be!), a house could become a true village with a living community that is actually worth living in.

You just roughly described a typical block in the 19th century Eixample district of Barcelona, for example, or perhaps the Isokon flats in Hampstead. Some libertarian will no doubt remind us that the first is an example of bottom-up evolution and teh free markets, but let's remember that the Eixample is called that because it was precisely an example, a grand project of inspired town planning.

Jon@104 - your ‘burban house may be walkable to your key destinations, I couldn’t possibly comment, but low density living generally inherently has fewer walkable “trip generators” (to you use the transport planning terminology).

If you have 5000 people per square km then you have more people walkable to a given point than if you have 1000, so you can support more businesses within walking distance. The more spread out you get the more of your destinations will involve a car trip.

But it’s not just about walking, as your density increases public transport becomes more practical at higher frequencies, hence public transport becomes more attractive relative to car. Eventually metro systems become practical as your density keeps going up.

Until we solve how to move cars around without emitting CO2 public transport is going to be a more sustainable transport method than car travel.

Andrew @97: I'm fairly confident that there will be transport (better batteries, biofuels, etc.). Living in suburbia will be feasible for a small minority.

The problem as I see it is that (1) We have problems, between peak oil and climate change, and (2) We have solutions, in that urban living (with good design) drastically reduces energy consumption, but everybody ignores it, waiting for the perfect-shaped magic wand that makes wasteful lifestyles feasible.

I'm strongly in favour of coming up with new solutions: fusion for example is pitifully funded given its potential, but in the mean time we need to move _now_ with the solutions we have.

Speaking of poorly designed cities -- Orlando, FL has a lower population density than it's suburb Winter Park... :)

I think trying to get Americans to move to cities is an exercise in futility. Retrofitting US cities to handle higher densities will be prohibitively expensive. And given that people have spend the past 50 years leaving the high density areas for low density ones, I think it's apparent that Americans will not willingly give that up. At the same time, the real rural population has stagnated or declined, which makes it apparent that suburban life is the American ideal.

Inventing a fusion reactor will be easier than getting Americans to move to cities.

Making journeys walkable is important. Mixing public social spaces in with residences is important. Differentiating dwellings and allowing customization is important. Avoiding planned-in dead spots and transport bottlenecks is important. Get all of these things right (or mostly right) and you end up with something like where I live ...

Edinburgh, the new town. Dwellings are mostly made out of stone, in small tenement blocks. Originally a builder would buy a plot of land and build on it. They'd erect a tenement block (cellar, ground floor, two to four upper stories with residential apartments) around a shared stairwell. Frequently the developer would live in the top apartment themselves, or in a ground-level one with its own front door, and rent out the other apartments -- or they'd sell the freehold.

Leave my front door and walk thirty metres along my street and you will pass, on each side, five to ten dwellings (above ground level), two shop units (or pubs or cafes) at ground level, and possibly some offices in the cellar level "garden flats".

Within one hundred metres of my front door, without entering any side roads, I can find: four or five pubs, four or five restaurants, a pharmacy, a dozen or so small boutique shops selling various product types, an organic food shop, four corner shops/newsagents, and a couple of wine merchants or off-license liquor stores. Allowing myself to wander a little further afield (still within a hundred metres of the front door) I can find lawyers, dentists and doctors surgeries, more restaurants thank I can wave a stick at, a cinema multiplex, health clubs, a department store ... and if I'm lucky, a parking space for my car.

(Yes, there's a drawback to this way of life: the parking situation is horrible. Mostly because Edinburgh's new town was gridded out in the 1750s, before anyone ever imagined ubiquitous automobile ownership.)

The nearest supermarket is, alas, more like 250 metres away; but if we widen the radius to 500 metres (about a five minute walk) there are three or four of them within easy reach. (Plus three taxi ranks, two car hire companies, several bus routes, a major railway station, and -- coming in 2011 -- a tram system.)

The point I'm making is that high-density living (a 100 metre strip of frontage along the road I live on probably houses 100 people) is very pleasant if there's plenty of public space mixed in with the residences. You don't have to drive to find a bar or a cafe or a restaurant if the zoning laws permit the right mix of retail and business premises to coexist with housing.

Alistair, Andrew G,
The costs of transportation from suburbs to work in the urban areas will take care of some of that.
I live in one of the farther corners of the city of L.A., and I work downtown (where former office buildings are being converted to expensive loft apartments). The price of commuter-train tickets is set at a little less than the cost of driving and parking (for my station, it's USD$207 per month). This means that people who move to the suburbs (for more space or lower housing costs) get to pay more to get to their place of work (and get less of it, beyond a certain point). Those of us who stay in the city get better public transportation and shorter commutes.

chalie@112 "is that high-density living (a 100 metre strip of frontage along the road I live on probably houses 100 people) is very pleasant if there's plenty of public space mixed in with the residences. You don't have to drive to find a bar or a cafe or a restaurant if the zoning laws permit the right mix of retail and business premises to coexist with housing."

That may be pleasant for some people, but not necessarily for others. Suburbs tend to be greener, have more private space and quieter than city living. Kids can more easily play in suburban streets than city ones. The suburbanization of living areas, in most western countries attests to the desirability of this lifestyle. That it currently requires a car (or to be fair, a bicycle) to be practical, is a choice/cost that is clearly deemed worthwhile to most. If that cost becomes untenable due to extremely high fuel prices, then changes will occur. Far more likely that physical trips will be reduced with more telecommuting and delivery services, rather than trying to re-urbanize.

Alex: yes, the big point is that zoning makes all the difference. You need green spaces, playgrounds for kids, and so on. (Hint: real estate bubbles tend to make urban living unpleasant because there's an incentive to divert space needed for common use -- such as parks -- to property developers.)

The point I'm making is that high-density living (a 100 metre strip of frontage along the road I live on probably houses 100 people) is very pleasant if there's plenty of public space mixed in with the residences. You don't have to drive to find a bar or a cafe or a restaurant if the zoning laws permit the right mix of retail and business premises to coexist with housing.There seems to be an unconscious but indelible idea of what constitutes high-density living here in the States, which is something along the lines of Silverberg's Urbmons. But I think the point about public space (and public greenery!) is probably the most salient one - no one would want to live in the suburbs if every house was sitting on a concrete apron extending to the street and to the neighbors on the side.

Jon@104:

My 'burban HOUSE is perfectly walkable (that also contradicts your point, Johnny@91), because it was a priority for us. And, Chariie, you're right about the A/C being pretty important in Austin - but, then, let's see you do without heat in Scotland.

Good for you. That's not a slam - we have the same setup so that work is a twenty minute walk away. But the problem is that this is possible only because the competition for these spots is small. If everyone wanted to be a twenty minute walk from their place of business, what would city layout look like? Which brings me to

As I understand it, there are basic physics limitations on how good batteries can get. Yes, there can be Breakthroughs with a capital B, and yes, there are other energy storage formats besides the battery (say fuel cells, or flywheels.) But expecting something like a factor of ten improvement in these technologies is not something that is just going to automatically happen. People tend to concentrate on just one or two parameters, like energy density, forgetting that fixed installations inside an enclosure are way easier than something like the requirements for an automobile. Temperature variations of over 100 degrees, jolts, bumps, etc. And this must all be done for pennies on the mile. That's some good engineering! So maybe improvements of a factor of two or three or even four could be considered reasonable. But no more.

Putting this all together, wasn't there some sort of hub-and-spoke model for urbanization back in the 30's? So you have these smallish centers of living/commerce that are maybe five miles across on the large side, with some sort of rail system connecting them to a somewhat larger complex, which are in turn connected to a still larger center. IIRC, the comparison was to the structure of a lung; you know the whole organic nature-knows-best yadda yadda sort of thing(Hmmm . . . maybe I'm thinking of Bucky Fuller.)

Electrics work fine already in ranges of up to 20-40 miles. Make them standardized enough, and you could just drive them up onto the bed of a rail car to be handled Japanese style. Drive them off at your destination, possibly without ever leaving your car.

The point I'm making is that high-density living (a 100 metre strip of frontage along the road I live on probably houses 100 people) is very pleasant if there's plenty of public space mixed in with the residences. You don't have to drive to find a bar or a cafe or a restaurant if the zoning laws permit the right mix of retail and business premises to coexist with housing.

There seems to be an unconscious but indelible idea of what constitutes high-density living here in the States, which is something along the lines of Silverberg's Urbmons. But I think the point about public space (and public greenery!) is probably the most salient one - no one would want to live in the suburbs if every house was sitting on a concrete apron extending to the street and to the neighbors on the side.

Jon@104:

My 'burban HOUSE is perfectly walkable (that also contradicts your point, Johnny@91), because it was a priority for us. And, Chariie, you're right about the A/C being pretty important in Austin - but, then, let's see you do without heat in Scotland.

Good for you. That's not a slam - we have the same setup so that work is a twenty minute walk away. But the problem is that this is possible only because the competition for these spots is small. If everyone wanted to be a twenty minute walk from their place of business, what would city layout look like? Which brings me to

As I understand it, there are basic physics limitations on how good batteries can get. Yes, there can be Breakthroughs with a capital B, and yes, there are other energy storage formats besides the battery (say fuel cells, or flywheels.) But expecting something like a factor of ten improvement in these technologies is not something that is just going to automatically happen. People tend to concentrate on just one or two parameters, like energy density, forgetting that fixed installations inside an enclosure are way easier than something like the requirements for an automobile. Temperature variations of over 100 degrees, jolts, bumps, etc. And this must all be done for pennies on the mile. That's some good engineering! So maybe improvements of a factor of two or three or even four could be considered reasonable. But no more.

Putting this all together, wasn't there some sort of hub-and-spoke model for urbanization back in the 30's? So you have these smallish centers of living/commerce that are maybe five miles across on the large side, with some sort of rail system connecting them to a somewhat larger complex, which are in turn connected to a still larger center. IIRC, the comparison was to the structure of a lung; you know the whole organic nature-knows-best yadda yadda sort of thing(Hmmm . . . maybe I'm thinking of Bucky Fuller.)

Electrics work fine already in ranges of up to 20-40 miles. Make them standardized enough, and you could just drive them up onto the bed of a rail car to be handled Japanese style. Drive them off at your destination, possibly without ever leaving your car.

Agreed. BUT, as should be clear, once you have a city, it is next to impossible to change its structure. Old cities like Edinburgh, London, Rome, Athens, etc tend to have structures that don't change, except on the growth periphery (unless they suffered some devastation like aerial bombing). You can zone new city development, although in the US what happens is that zoning is initially for farmland, then it changes to mixed suburban as the area gets redeveloped or absorbed into the nearest town/city. New cities rarely get built from scratch (Brazilia being a notable exception, and of course Basildon and Milton Keynes in the UK - both ugh).

Trying to increase densities in suburbia meets with a lot of resistance. During the 1990's housing boom, there was a lot of town home development in Silicon valley - big houses on tiny lots, often adjacent to malls. I think they are as bad in their way as those Corbusier inspired public housing projects in Europe. Every time one of these high density, but still expensive, tracts is development, there is a lot of resistance at council meetings (usually ignored as towns just love the tax base, especially when the developer has to pay for other infrastructure costs).

The nightmare city scenario is those 3rd world mega-cities. Vast areas of barrios and shanty-towns on the edge of established cities. And yet many of these exist because life is apparently better there than in the country, although they are appalling in most respects. Imagine Edinburgh surrounded by shanty towns as migrants, displaced by global warming effects in failed states, move to northern Europe for some sort of life. (I think James Burke described such scenarios in his early 1990's documentary "After the Warming").

But as you say, big picture view, urbanization (including suburbia) will change a lot of thinking about infrastructure. Isn't the UK floating a trial balloon right now about ending universal postal service - which I assume targets rural dwellers. A replay of the Beeching cuts to rail in the 1960s?

Agreed. I would expect minor improvements in electrical power storage in the future in terms of power density, but there's less more scope in terms of charging times: capacitors, perhaps. I don't really expect 500km-range electrical vehicles to become common.

The work of the combustion lab in the Uni where I work has made me much more appreciative of the power density of carbon fuels. I think petrol / diesel / methane will be replaced with other synthetic fuels, made by various means, with high power density. And we have an existing infrastructure for handling such stuff. But for most vehicle-miles, electric is better, to the point where if I need it, I'll hire a car with that long a range.

Personally, I can see my next vehicle purchase being an electric car. I live 15km out of a small city; I've got a bike, and a small car aging fast. For long journeys the e. car won't cut it - but I'm doing them by public transport anyway. (Bikes don't cut it at 5am in the rain on a national road, heading to the train station). For a 20 minute journey a small vehicle is fine, but I don't fancy being cooped up in it in a train. And I positively don't want a car in Dublin: its overhead it terms of parking.

Agreed. I would expect minor improvements in electrical power storage in the future in terms of power density, but there's much more scope in terms of charging times: capacitors, perhaps. I don't really expect 500km-range electrical vehicles to become common.

The combustion lab in the Univ. where I work has made me much more appreciative of the power density of carbon fuels. I think petrol / diesel / methane will be replaced with other synthetic fuels, made by various means, with high power density. And we have an existing infrastructure for handling such stuff. But for most vehicle-miles, electric is better, to the point where if I need it, I'll hire a carbon-fuel-car for longer journeys.

Personally, I can see my next vehicle purchase being an electric car. I live 15km out of a small city: I've got a bicycle, and a small car thats aging fast. For long journeys the e-car won't cut it - but I'm doing them by train anyway. (Bikes are suicidal at 5am in the rain on a fast, twisty country road heading to the train station). For a 20 minute journey a small vehicle is fine, but I don't fancy being cooped up in it on a train, so I don't see the point of the train-car concept. And I positively don't want a car in Dublin: its overhead it terms of parking.

Strangely enough, living somewhere-remote-outside-a-city means I use a car locally, but for long journeys its mostly to a city with good transport: I can hire a car when I get there, but I never see the point: public transport is sufficient.

Doowop @67: Trey and Mr. Stross - conversion from fundamentalism to secularism may exceed the reverse, but it is still miniscule compared to the higher Fundy birth rate.

True, yet ALL First World countries are becoming more secular with every decade, not less. Nobody addressed this apparent contradiction yet, but the answer is simple -- although children of fundamentalist parents very rarely become atheists, it is very common for them to give up stricter tenets of their faith, and to raise their children as moderate Christians (or Muslims, for that matter). And their children in turn grow up as "Christians in name only", atheists, or "apatheists" (Love that word!). So conversion from fundamentalism to secularism is actually commonplace -- it just takes a few generations.

For a 20 minute journey a small vehicle is fine, but I don't fancy being cooped up in it on a train, so I don't see the point of the train-car concept. And I positively don't want a car in Dublin: its overhead it terms of parking.

The idea is that you do only spend 20 minutes or so on the 'train'. But you travel much, much faster; 20 minutes will get you 40 miles down the road. That's way farther than you need to go to reach other urban centers. The next level up would be faster/larger trains, and you would have the option of taking your car with you or riding in a coach. You would have this option at the first level too, actually, but I was thinking of a semi-automated system where every five to ten minutes a carriage rolls up with computer-controlled parking spaces. Think of is as a sort of land ferry.

The idea is not just to save time; it's to save the juice in your batteries and wear and tear on your vehicle. I haven't done any research on this, but since I'm the typical driver (:-), I'm guessing that most people do most of their driving in a ten-mile radius. There are exceptions of course, work being the outstanding one, but I've noticed that I don't tend to put a lot of miles on my car unless I'm driving some distance, taking a number of small trips at my destination, and then driving back. The purpose of these ferries then is just to cut out the one big long distance round trip.

Charlie @112, and that works well for you. But I couldn't get to your flat (probably couldn't enter the building) and there's a good chance I couldn't walk/wheel to or enter the places you mention. Just how accessible do you make that kind of place? What about retrofitting?

Marilee: well, the problem with my apartment is that it was built in 1829 and is in a World Heritage Site, making major structural modifications rather ... difficult. (I can't even fit double-glazing.) There is, however, a happy medium in the shape of dense mixed-use areas that aren't historic chunks of our architectural heritage.

You said that suburban living in Western countries demonstrates it's desirability. That's a pretty far stretch because it ignores the politics behind the creation of suburbia. I can't say for countries that aren't the US, hell, even for states that aren't California and Las Vegas, but the rise of suburbia in California was an extremely politicized process that had at least as much to do with huge contracts to huge advertising campaigns, freeway developers and automobile manufacturers as any desire for people to live away from the city. In Los Angeles, it's a matter of court record that auto and freeway guys sabotaged public transportation - they knew precisely how much money could be made from sprawl. Combine this with the defunding of WPA projects after the WWII era (meaning substantially less development in urban spaces because parks and such don't make money), as well as funding changes in police departments (such as the move towards compartmentalization in law enforcement where cops consciously sought to keep crime away from certain neighborhoods (also pioneered in Los Angeles) . . . well, the idea that Californians, at least, spontaneously decided to go into the burbs is pure mythology. AFAIK, these same forces are in existence everywhere in the industrialized world to some extent. Cities were consciously designed so people would need cars and law enforcement concepts like compartmentalization (which were very significant in the second half of the 20th century and still are in many jurisdictions, if not in policy as part of the law enforcement culture) created a social climate that made the burbs attractive - but it didn't happen in a vacuum. A lot of people made a lot of money on designing cities for the suburbs and this has really distorted city planning in a lot of ways. It wasn't inevitable.

People were moving to the suburbs in the 1920s in the US, if not sooner. Look at an old Sears & Roebuck catalog and you can see all of the house plans people could get to build their own single family suburban homes.

Even before cars became common and economical, people were moving to suburbs along the tram lines.

Suburb is a Latin term. I guess you could say that suburbanization has been going on since the Roman Republic. And certainly that some people have tried to get away from cities. But that'd miss the thrust of my point: suburbs didn't just develop without a social context.

Like I said, my knowledge is fairly specifically Californian and Southern Nevadan, and maybe that creates a confirmation bias when looking at the history of other cities - but, I mean, the suggestion that suburbanization was developing along tram lines basically reinforces my point, you realize. That this stuff was set in motion at least partially through the development of a specific technological infrastructure that was decided would be used in a particular way.

@93 the out-breading/meme thing has as much to do with consensus biases and the such like, than total numbers
@121 how many new recruits, or 'backsliders' do you need to keep the number of god bothers climbing. I guess that the most success in secularism happens then in religions that are culturally tied 'efFnic', rather than proslytising. Did anyone see that heart breaking film about the Amish lads on the BBC last week or so?

I'm sure that the relationship between the thought and the deed is more complex than that.
If your in a thoughtful mood - get your hands on 'thought contagion' by aaron lynch for a interesting in spin on the memetics view, edging towards psycho-history. borrow or steal it - it made me feel abit mucky after a while, - apparently the rejection of homophobia in a society is proportional to the variation in genetic homosexuals in a population! among other things… so once homosexuals stop having kids and die everyone forgets that they are meant to be nice to them!

Chris @127: not only is suburb a Latin term -- so is submarine. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to deduce from this that the Romans had U-boats.

(Hint: during the 17th through 19th centuries it was quite normal for scholars to invent English-language neologisms by glomming Latin and Greek words together. It still is, in some disciplines -- medicine, for example.)

It seems like our communication is done more and more through wires and less and less through satellites.

Seems like we won't need heavy duty lasers and debris to reach the state of communication in "Accelerando" - without satellites. This has probably some implications on the viability of human space travel as going alongside commercial ventures.

many of these exist because life is apparently better there than in the country

From what I've read and seen in documentary films life is effectively impossible in the country because there's way to have an income for all the people living there. The situation is similar to the mass migration to the cities in England in the early 19th century, but there are a lot more people involved.

ScentOfViolets @ 116: You're right that there's some limit on practical energy density for batteries (given other constraints like max current requirements for acceleration, internal resistance for min. required charge hold time, and so one). I do think you're being somewhat pessimistic on the limits achievable in the next decade or two, though. Graphene could provide at least 2X energy density over the best lithium ion batteries we have now, and doesn't require expensive raw materials that are already in short supply. Even assuming graphene is not practical for some reason, some version of a nano-electrode design will probably prove viable, with likely advantage of 4x or 5x improvement (since that's what lab experiments with small material samples show now) over lithium, quite possibly more.

Charlie, et. al. on high density housing: It may be that the older megacities like Greater London, BosWash, and Greater Tokyo will be hurting because they've built so densely early on that they can't change. But there's a class of smaller cities which have small urban cores and less dense first rings which used to be suburbs but are now part of the city. Those first rings can be converted to hub/star transit systems, with density that grades away from the transit line, allowing open and public spaces mixed in. This is what is happening right now to Portland, Oregon, for instance (the hilly topography which resulted in spreading the city out has made it more practical here, but I'll take luck if I can get it). If politics were to get out of the way it's what could happen in Seattle, which is larger and even more spread out. It might also be possible in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is relatively new, but the number of community governments involved could defeat any real change.

apparently the rejection of homophobia in a society is proportional to the variation in genetic homosexuals in a population! among other things… so once homosexuals stop having kids and die everyone forgets that they are meant to be nice to them!

The idea that homosexuality will die out of the population and not recur assumes that the genetic tendency to homosexuality is either a tightly-knit cluster of genes, all of which are dominantly expressed, or that there's a single key gene, also dominant, without which homosexuality isn't likely to happen. But what if part or all of the gene constellation required is recessive, or if part of it is an expression network that controls the other part? Or for that matter that it's a common mutation that occurs at intervals in most populations?

Is there any evidence that homosexuality has ever disappeared from a population?

I do think you're being somewhat pessimistic on the limits achievable in the next decade or two, though. Graphene could provide at least 2X energy density over the best lithium ion batteries we have now, and doesn't require expensive raw materials that are already in short supply. Even assuming graphene is not practical for some reason, some version of a nano-electrode design will probably prove viable, with likely advantage of 4x or 5x improvement (since that's what lab experiments with small material samples show now) over lithium, quite possibly more.

This may be pessimistic; certainly I'm not one of the in crowd and I don't have any special expertise. I'm merely looking at the history of hype versus reality in this sort of technology. The earliest example I can remember personally was a claim in 1980 or thereabouts for a new process which would drop the cost of solar cells to $0.10 a square foot, with efficiencies in the 9% to 11% range. How did that work out? Through decades since then, seems that every two or three years some extravagant claim is made for solar cells, or batteries or flywheels (I think this used to be the case with room-temperature superconductors, but the bloom seems to be permanently off the rose with that one): a four-fold gain in energy density, or a ten-fold drop in cost, or a promising ultracheap catalyst for fuel cells. Then the buzz goes away and that's the last you ever hear about it.

I conclude that developing things of this nature is not a matter of assembling the right team of investigators and throwing money at them. It takes much longer and is less a 'breakthrough' tech (the only kind you ever seem to see in the movies) and more a slow grinding incrementalism. Bear in mind that for something like an automotive application, several competing criteria have to be fulfilled simultaneously. A suitable battery has to have a high energy density. And it has to be rugged. And it has to be reliable. And it has to be safe. And it has to have a reasonable duty cycle, taking no more than a few hours to recharge, while lasting for several thousand charge/discharges.

And it has to be cheap.

Do I think that there is a fair chance that something like graphene or nano-electrodes will come along in the near future that would have four or five times the energy density of the best lithium batteries? I'll certainly concede this. Do I think that once this new technique comes along it will be readily and cheaply adapted for use in automobiles? I'd guesstimate less than one chance in 20 in the near future.

A funny story: I think that by the age of eight or nine I had decided to become a 'scientist' because I had discovered the Arcot, Wade, and Morey stories. On this dubious basis, I assumed that what science guys did was come up with theories, and then used them to build stuff, the whole business from initial puzzling observation to the rollout of the finished product taking no more than a week or so.

Andrew G @ 126 - the early suburbs that I'm familiar with, like Somerville, MA, are built along Charlie's lines. Frequently, subway stops are within walking distance, and there are small shops and you can often walk to a drugstore if not a grocery store, and there are a number of small restaurants.

Wikipedia has an entry on streetcar suburbs that looks plausible. At least around Boston, the dense suburbs are frequently multi-family homes. You get three apartments in one house on fairly small lots. If you make the bottom floor a single apartment and put a wheelchair ramp out front, you get a reasonably accessible apartment at least until it snows.

Not all of the places are multi-family houses; there are predominantly multi-family neighborhoods and predominantly single-family neighborhoods.

Suburbs existed in Roman times. IIRC, the ones immediately outside the city proper were poor, and had industries that couldn't be placed inside a city. Further out were suburbs for the wealthy, where they would have "country estates" that they could visit.

FungiFromYuggoth
And in Los Angeles, you get neighborhoods where there are lots of mobile home parks. The impression I get is that those were shunted (by zoning, mostly) out to the fringe areas (edge of the city, or edge of industrial areas) early on, and then the city grew around them.

I find the refitting of older buildings downtown as residential to be interesting, but those places are also very expensive, to the point where most of the people who work downtown can't afford them. (For whatever it might be worth: downtown LA stands in for New York City a lot in films and TV. 'Without A Trace' was filmed in downtown LA, for example.)

FungiFromYoggoth: Something like that is happening now in some medium-sized cities that have put in light-rail lines to 3rd ring suburbs or satellite cities. In the intermediate low-density suburbs high-density mixed residential/commercial neighborhoods are created in the areas around the train stations; the model is often one taken from larger cities where 3 or 4 story buildings house shops on the bottom floor and apartments / condos on the upper floors.

Johnny99.1 pointed out:But it’s not just about walking, as your density increases public transport becomes more practical at higher frequencies, hence public transport becomes more attractive relative to car. Eventually metro systems become practical as your density keeps going up.

But, those of us in low- and medium-density cities do get to spend, on average, FAR less time traveling (the headline, of course, applies to the US, not Europe). That said, you're right; we just saw an announcement that Austin's first Metro rail link will be running late and won't open this month as scheduled; even here, there are those with enough patience and willingness to take a time hit, like my wife.

ScentOfViolets@117 wrote:If everyone wanted to be a twenty minute walk from their place of business, what would city layout look like?

Austin's laid enough well enough that a huge proportion of city neighborhoods have such opportunities. But, it's true interest's limited because the car's so much more effective for most of us (see last para); calculations changed when gas was expensive, of course, and will change again. Other regions, like DC burbs and most parts of San Diego, do have that problem, I think, because in most American cities, only a handful of fashionable neighborhoods and places laid out since New Urbanism are long on good commercial integration. Now, to be fair, my wife doesn't work anywhere close; I work from home, though.

They also had 'burbs in Classical Greece - there was much unhappiness in democratic Athens in one of several wars between them and Sparta, because Athenian strategy was to let the burbs be razed - Athens had the better fleet and walls, which let it stand seige indefinitely, while Sparta had the better army. The Athenian leader, Pericles lived in a no-doubt fancy burb, and gave his mansion to the city to prevent a conflict of interest question if it WASN'T razed.

Socialism, it looks like. See here. But it's going to be a lot different than what everyone hoped for. I don't think anyone dreamed that capitalism was subject to technological obsolescence. If we're very smart and we work at it, we will use the next two centuries to reduce our population to sustainable levels, and go back to a world with room for wildness. But the next two centuries are going to be times of privation.

Oh, now here's something you haven't predicted: a new revelation. For real. All the old ones are past their use-by dates.

bruce @133
sorry I hoped you might get from my tone, that I think the man is madder than a box of badgers. He isn't even a social science dude, but started off a physics nerd at MIT, seems to welded to the idea that successfu/popularl cultural traits are one to one linked to reproductive success. How do you find direct linkages in the mess that is the subconscious? And aren't selfish genes/memes famously short sighted? even counting viable grandchildren is beyond the event horizon for them. and there was I thinking all this bruhaha was us trying to grow up and think beyond the day after tomorrows dinner.

as for 'burbs, I live in a 150 year old house, opposite the original house in in the street, built for an early 1800's duke of Liverpool's mistress. Huge mansions have been replaced by council estates which sit next to private estates, hospitals and golf courses, the nearest shops are 1/2 mile away in later developments ie Edwardian a mere 110 years old. (red) ken kinda sorted out the public transport, after the initial antagonism of the railway was over come but it still takes an hour to get the 15 miles into town, because some bugger built a wall around several square miles of prime real estate 400 years ago and now there is only one real road in or out to anywhere civilized. Planning? Zoning what is this?
Cunningly, though, every square inch of space is being turned into apartments.

I have bounced back and forth between city and suburb most of my life, so find this sub-thread interesting.

AFAIK the first suburb in the USA was Brooklyn Heights, where the rich of New Amsterdam built second homes across the East River, late 1600s. Still has homes from 1700s and many from 1800s (the 1888 one I grew up after I was born on Broadway and spent first 9 months in upper West side, in being 10 storeys was "the first skyscraper in Brooklyn"). The exemplar planned suburb in the USA was, immediately post-World War II, Levittown, where my Dad, upon demobilization and odd jobs, bought a home for $8,000. Almost none of the original Levittown homes survive without substantian upgrades/modifications.

Dad went to Harvard -- Cambridge was once a suburb of Boston, brother went to school there, I hithhiked often to MIT from the old New England town of Amherst where I did grad school in Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics and nanotechnology 1973-1977, and was elected to the Town Council. It was possible to build infraststructure that students wanted IFF the homeowners could see it as a prudent investment.

Lived in Kent, a suburb of Seattle when working on space stuff for Boeing, in the territory haunted by the Green River serial killer.

Now in Greater Los Angeles. Pasadena wasn't a suburb, though, but a city of its own with Old Money and which was a tourist destination. Live now in a suburb of Pasadena, and thus 2 steps out from L.A., into what is termed "unincorporated community." These have not taken the votes for city-hood, so have no police of their own, but are vaguely protected by the Los Angeles County Sheriffs, and mostly neglected by the L.A. County Supervisors, some of whose territories are larger than some states, and whose constituences are more than most congressmen and some senators.

I don't want to go on at length about the governmental system here, an uneasy blend of the Code of the West (L.A. once had the highest murder rate in the USA by far) and staggeringly expensive byzantine bureaucracy. Just wanted to give my bias on suburbs and the simmering rebellion of some of the thousands of Counties against cities and states. A Brit might wonder: "what's the point of counties when you have no counts?" but they are a layer of government other than the states, cities, and suburbs which get almost all the press. Sometimes cities annex the surrounding counties for tax advantages. Rarely a new county fissions from an old, as Orange County did from Los Angeles County. But these entities cannot be ignored in questions of 21st century transportation and communications and energy infrastructure, nor for employment, nor for education nor health care.

maggie @ 141: Sorry I misunderstood you; I guess I've been seeing too many flaming trolls* lately, and I've got an itchy trigger finger. But what is it about physicists that they have to come up with these lame theories to support their bigotry? Remember Shockley and the race IQ theory?

Jonathan Vos Post @ 142: In some areas counties are trying to overcome their relative lack of political power by banding together into regional governments. This is especially true around metropolitan areas, where the surrounding counties have an uneasy love/hate relationship with the metro center.

* Bad internet joke: why is a troll like duck? Because the elephant tries to stamp it out. Oh, never mind; you had to be there.

Bruce- the simple fact is, the more intelligent you are, the bigger and better the theory you can come up with to support your personal biases and bigotry. The disturbing thing is how many otherwise intelligent people fall for so many stupid or nasty things, and will persist in their belief and actions when less intelligent people have given up. Theres a name for it, I just can't recall what.

There is a particularly bad one on the BBC blogs just now, spouting the usual rubbish about IQ being very important and how some sections of society seem to be outbreeding others, especially all those immigrants who score low on IQ tests. They need swatted, but are very good at insinuating rather than making a definite statement that can get them modded.

Oh, and I can vouch for maggie.

AS for cities, on my way to work along the M8 I have been struck by 2 things- one is how many people commute from one city to the other, and the other is the need for a good replacement for our current road building which has a long lifespan and doesn't use so much fossil fuels. Now I am aware that our current heavy road damage is caused by lots of large heavy lorries; without them well built sections of road can last for many decades.

guthrie @ 144: Much too large a part of the energy budget of the most industrialized countries goes to shipment of commodities; it's especially bad in the US because of our lousy rail system, resulting in a lot of truck shipment, which is not terribly efficient for non-time-limited goods. So you get a twofer when you move those shipments to rail, or remove them altogether by switching to local procurement: the roads last longer and the CO2 emissions go down

C'mon! Yer quibbling! Yeah, sure, words get recycled and redefined, but sometimes their meaning isn't very far from the initial word. We could play a virtually endless game of you finding a word with a Latin root that means the opposite of its old meaning while I find one whose meaning is pretty much the same today as then. I would argue that suburb in a modern context would have meaning to a medieval Frenchman or Roman Senator one they'd sorted through its derivation. As opposed to a submarine where they'd go, "What the fuck is that?!"

But my point was, and is, that the rise of suburbia and the destruction of many city's downtown areas was not simply "preference", at least not in the latter half of the 20th century when the modern suburb was developed - it was something that was designed to happen by specific people for highly specific reasons and, to my understanding, most of them not because people really wanted to live out of the cities really badly. That suburbia was, to a pretty large extent, a manufactured desire, manufactured by people who wanted to build roads, cars, and all the fuel that would go into all those vehicles moving so far all the time. At least here in California and Southern Nevada. I don't claim expertise anywhere else. ;)

Chris, not that simple. A lot of the people who moved into the new auto-oriented suburbs had lived in rural environments previously--they weren't comfortable in highly urban environments. So these were transitional forms. It's been about two generations, and the advantages of closer living are dawning.

I think you way over-emphasize the corporate involvement in suburbia creation. Suburban living can be very desirable for families, compared to the city. As a resident of CA you know that a "Edge city" development is mixed business and residential, reducing commute distances, although at the same time making European style radial public transportation impossible. While many people, like Charlie, enjoy city living, many others do not. This is not some brainwashing or social engineering. Many people enjoy living is Savanna-like environments. Suburbia offers a reasonable compromise of lifestyle as long as transport is fairly inexpensive and available.

P J Evans #137 - I'm not sure what ex-streetcar suburbs and mobile home parks enveloped by the city have in common, besides "poor planning". The removal of streetcars from streetcar suburbs has made life more difficult, since life is often car-centric and parking is ungood at normal times and double-plus ungood in snow emergencies.

I don't think that urban renovated housing being expensive is an inherent property; if the property is desirable, then developers are going to push the luxury end of the market to increase the margin on the eventual sale. The condos in renovated mills around New England were pretty reasonably priced until the housing market got silly. If the luxury market were tapped, mid-range renovations would become more common. (Disclaimer: California real estate may not match the rest of the universe. YMMV.)

Bruce Cohen #138: Agreed, there are a couple of models in the US that show that Americans are willing (nay, eager) to live in fairly dense mixed-zoned environments.

Agree completely. A lot of people, especially those who do not like suburbs, seem to forget that suburbs are the safest environment for human children EVER. One may argue that it is psychologically unhealthy for children to grow up in what is essentially county-sized nursery and that certain amount of danger is desirable, but try explaining that to most parents. People want to live in suburbs because they want their children to be SAFE. Which also explains part of the reason why cities are relatively much more attractive to young childless adults -- the single biggest attraction of suburban life is irrelevant to them.

Fungi, it may be poor planning (Ghu knows there's plenty of that around here, as well as money buying planning permissions that should have been denied), but it's also zoning 'those guys we don't want around here' into the fringes.

This has strange side-effects, like parcels with zoning that allows livestock, in the middle of areas that are otherwise urban. (Take a look at an aerial view of, say, Woodland Hills west of Topanga Canyon Blvd. Those are large lots.)

The abundance of Earth-like planets will be determined in the next five years, with profound implications for the prevalence of life in the universe. Alan Boss describes the coming revolution in extrasolar planetology.... The Kepler mission will determine how frequently Earths occur in our galaxy: do 1% of Sun-like stars have Earth-like companions? 10%? 100%? Given that there are billions of Sun-like stars in our galaxy alone, the number of Earth-like worlds must be similarly immense. Whatever the answer, by the time Kepler finishes its primary mission in 2013, we will know just how crowded the universe really is.

Singularity - suppose there's just a 1% chance over the next 50 years of a confluence of accelerating change creating a "singularity" with at least as much impact as a large asteroid hitting the earth or a super volcano erupting.

Why would we put any concerned thought into the latter, but dismiss a singularity as not worth thinking about, mere "rapture of the nerds" foolishness? Because major asteroid strikes and super volcano eruptions are *much* more likely, right?

Sure, I know it's fashionable to be a singularity denier right now - among nerds who want to be cool. "The Singularity? Hah! How 90's! I'm so over that - oops - I mean - I never thought there was anything to it..."

"People want to live in suburbs because they want their children to be SAFE."

Currently, perhaps. I've been thinking this through recently and came to the conclusion that, if things are going to get a bit 5th century in the next thirty years, there are a number of things that I can do with my kids which will give them a decent chance of surviving this period in at least a little style.

Heading to the 'burbs will prevent them from learning how to live in complex and slightly grungy communities. I think that it's the skills of the urban environment which will get us through this, even if we also end up applying them in the suburbs as well. So they need those skills. Heading to the hills would be even worse - this though is not an option because there are no hills in my country. Also, while I don't want them to fall to the barb, neither do I want them to _be_ the barb.

Heading to the 'burbs will prevent them from learning how to live in complex and slightly grungy communities.

I grew up in a small town which has a lot of retirees as well as a lot of families for the large local employers. It was a great place to grow up as a kid. Then I became a teenager and it turned out I was in the middle of nowhere and there was nothing to do. Later I went to university in London (and both the environment and my life were complex and grungy) It was a bit of a shock, but I learnt my way around fairly swiftly. It seems to me that when kids are kids, suburbs and small commuter towns are good and safe places for them. About the time they become teenagers, larger towns would probably be better. As young adults, city living will be appropriate. Having seen the options then they can figure out for themselves how and where to live. And if things go wrong, they've got all kinds of basic skills (so for example, I can run accounts using pencil and paper as well as a computer, but I also picked up on how to grow things on farms from part time jobs)

I over-generalise based on anecdotes. Also, ObSF, I note a similar pattern in Ken Macleod's Learning the World where the colonist generation grow up in small towns as they approach their destination star, and get bored and move on to the larger towns as teenagers.

I'm not altogether sure that, in the context of the UK (outside some bits of London, Manchester and Nottingham) suburbs are much _safer_ right now. Perhaps better, and perhaps they need less overt parental involvement.

"Black Swans":
Also referred to by Ian Banks as: "Out-of-Context Problems".
Also known as Oh BUGGER! .....

Religion:
I'm going to quote-with-alterations, the estimable PZ Myers' here - a bit long but ....
Today, on Earth,we have hundreds of thousands of priests, rabbis, mullahs, and preachers who are paid professionals, who claim to be active mediators between people and omnipotent invisible masters of the universe. They make specific claims about their god's nature, what he's made of and what he isn't, how he thinks and acts, what you should do to propitiate it…they somehow seem to have amazingly detailed information about this being. Yet, when a scientist approaches with a critical eye, suddenly it is a creature that not only has never been observed, but cannot observed, and its actions invisible, impalpible, and immaterial.
So where did these confident promoters of god-business get their information? Shouldn't they be admitting that their knowledge of this elusive cosmic beast is nonexistent? It seems to me that if you're going to declare scientists helpless before the absence and irrelevance of the gods, you ought to declare likewise for all of god's translators and interpreters. Be consistent when you announce who has purview over all religious belief, because making god unobservable and immeasurable makes everyone incapable of saying anything at all about it.
And what of those many millions of ordinary people who claim to have daily conversations with this entity? That is an impressive conduit for all kinds of testable information: a high bandwidth channel between the majority of people on Earth and a friendly, omniscient source of knowledge, and it isn't named Google. All these queries, and answers, and yet, none of these answers have enough meaning or significance to represent a testable body of counsel.
It sounds like empty noise to me.

Oh, and @67 - sounds like a hymn to unregulated US CAPITALISM to me.
Ugrrrugh.
No, the US education system is shit for a developed country, but, even there the religious shrills are, slowly, losing out.

@10 Resources - they are called "Water Wars" or "Hydraulic Monopolies" - both are very nasty.

@32 Codswallop
The "End of Slavery" MIGHT have been a Big Deal in the USA, but elsewhere .. de nada
Given the power of Steam, and industrialisation, slavery was doomed any way:"Soon shall thy arm, Unconquer'd STEAM! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.
Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above,
Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move
Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd
And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud."
Erasmus Darwin, 1791

On the topic of surveillance and ID, I also don't think it's avoidable. As long as we use "the commons" - water, roads, air, public institutions or funds etc. - there will always be the risk of "the tragedy of the commons", as people abuse things they do not own. As long as we use any resources provided by the government, the government wants to know that those resources are being allocated efficiently and are not abused.

Technology, in the form of surveillance, is their means for controlling those resources. If you could find yourself a little corner of wilderness somewhere, do no damage to the environment and take absolutely nothing from the government, you can avoid surveillance. If you venture out on to a public road, however... smile!

JvP@152 "The abundance of Earth-like planets will be determined in the next five years, with profound implications for the prevalence of life in the universe"

You do understand that Kepler will only be able to determine the distribution of planetary bodies that are earth sized and within the habitable zone of its star. It can tell us nothing about whether there is even liquid water on their surfaces, let alone life. A galaxy of sterile planetary bodies, while potentially fertile ground for life, are not "earth-like" in any usual sense of the word. To find out if these bodies have water and possibly life, will have to await spectroscopic observations by more powerful telescopes.

Both Venus and Mars are on the edge of the habitable zone, but both have no enduring liquid water on their surfaces and are sterile as far as we know.

When spectroscopic and later direct imaging of planets is possible and we discover worlds with atmospheres in non-thermal equilibrium, then there will be data on the local frequency of earth like worlds.

Alex Tolley@161: I agree. "Earth-like" was used in the quotation for "Earth-sized." I have enjoyed discussions with my students in Astronomy and Bio classes that I taught, when we discussed the subtleties of "habitable zone."

34,153: there's a foundational attack (reviewing Turing Test, Weizenbaum, Chinese Room) on the false assumptions of Naive A.I., and specifically undercutting the Rapture of the Nerds:

[This essay appears in the Winter 2009 print edition of The New Atlantis, available now in bookstores and on newsstands. It appears here as a free preview. To read future articles in The New Atlantis before they appear online, purchase a subscription here.]

So while transhumanists may join Ray Kurzweil in arguing that “we should not associate our fundamental identity with a specific set of particles, but rather the pattern of matter and energy that we represent,” we must remember that this supposed separation of particles and pattern is false: Every indication is that, rather than a neatly separable hierarchy like a computer, the mind is a tangled hierarchy of organization and causation. Changes in the mind cause changes in the brain, and vice versa. To successfully replicate the brain in order to simulate the mind, it will be necessary to replicate every level of the brain that affects and is affected by the mind....

If the future of artificial intelligence is based on the notion that the mind is really not a computer system, then this must be acknowledged as a radical rejection of the project thus far. It is a future in which the goal of creating intelligence artificially may succeed, but the grandest aspirations of the AI project will fade into obscurity.

"The neuron" is a VERY SIMPLE black-box, with properties that can, already be defined.
The PROBLEM, the real one, is the interconnections and massive parallelism within the brains of the "higher" animals, not just us.
It isn't the number of processors, or storageunits inside our brains, it's the vast number of interconnections, and the non-seriality of the info-processing going on, with feedback loops we haven't even STARTED on understanding.

This is NOT to say it is unknowable, or undoable, just very difficult, and in a different manner to that proposed by both the strong AI people, AND by their critics.

"Incidentally: The Nw Atlantis" as in:""We (The Merchants of Light) make up the noblest foundation that ever was upon the Earth. For the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and the secret nature of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."
??

I think autarky is going to get easier rather than more difficult, in economic terms. With more nuclear power nations need not depend on oil imports & with GM crops, hydroponics etc they need not depend on food imports & with generally increasing standards of living they have more options. On the other hand as the world gets smaller in speed of travel, internet & range of weapons terms we will see more pressure for big countries/alliances to tell little ones what to do.

What happens when the G50 tell Japan or Switzerland it is their duty to take as many immigrants as the rest of us do & they tell us to go to hell?

Returning to density – I think it’s clear that both well designed suburbs and well designed dense urban development can appeal as places to live, and that these choices may change at different times of your (and your families) life.

The problem (provided you accept the climate-change-CO2-emission case) is that it’s hard to see how the whole world can live like that. So unless you believe either

a) power generation is going to get a lot cleaner and batteries are going to get a lot better
or

b) it’s acceptable to keep, say, China with a third world living standard, and you have a plan for how to impose this view on China

then we need to get a lot better at building dense and making it attractive as a life choice, not just for young single people, but for families also.

I read some of Stross's earlier comments about the infeasibility of O'Neill style space colonization. His arguments seemed to be rooted in two issues, high launch costs and the lack of development of an effective biosphere technology. Like most Europeans, he believes that the lack of progress by government-funded bureaucracies in developing these technologies means that they are impossible. He does not believe that a start-up company or a small, focused research group can do anything that a large bureaucracy cannot. Thus, progress in these areas is not possible.

Another way to interpret Stross's comments with regards to these things is that he is simply aware that most of the human race is too stupid to develop these technologies and that, therefor, these technologies will not be developed. I agree with him on the first part of this, but not the second. It is certainly true that much of the human race is stupid. After all, they believe in things like socialism, the efficacy of bureaucracy, and that home values can increase forever. As Heinlein put it in one of his novels there are 3 kinds of people in the world. The largest group are those that never learn anything, ever. A second smaller group are those who learn only by painful personal experience. Then, there is an even smaller third group of people who are actually able to learn from the experiences of others or simply by using their heads. So, in one sense Charles is entirely correct. 99% of the human race will not colonize space or "singularize" themselves.

What Charles fails to understand is that there are SOME bright people out there and that SOME of these people are highly motivated to do things like cure aging and get us out into space. That these people are motivated by a desire to be free of bureaucracy, stifling governments, and the 99% of the human race that refuses to learn anything.

So, Charles is correct that 99% of the human race will never do any of these things. However, he is wrong in that 1% of the human race will do these things (and they will certainly not be Europeans. They may be Asian or American, but they will not be Europeans.)

Thanks for the broad brush-stroke; it helps me to see where you're coming from. Especially the bit about government-funded bureaucracies. (You're an American libertarian, I take it? How quaint.)

NB: you do not need to quote Heinlein at me; you may or may not have noticed that my last SF novel (Saturn's Children) was a Heinlein pastiche ... on the subject of space colonization. If you want to berate me for my perceived beliefs, you might like to take a look at the book first?

"And JvP it's WRONG - but for the wrong re[a]sons. 'The neuron' is a VERY SIMPLE black-box, with properties that can, already be defined."

I'll not impose on Mr. Stross with summarizing thousands of pages of PhD dissertation and subsequent papers, so here's bottom line IMHO.

The neuron is NOT a simple switch, or little black box. It is at least a minicomputer, performing extremely complex nonlinear computations on hundreds or thousands of inputs in complicated format, under control of genetic, hormonal, neurotransmitter, and other factors.

I contend with basis that the neuron is, in fact, a nanocomputer, and the neural network is NOT a Hebbseian McCullough-Pitts kind of net, but merely the Local Area Network of a distributed molecular computer, where 90%+ of the computation is being done by the non-steady-state dynamics of protein molecules within the neurons (and glial cells), in a Laplace-transform domain quite different from the physical substrate (*thinks* Greg Egan's Diapora) as determined by my peer reviewed Mathematical Biology solutions to the Michaelis-Menten equations of the metabolism, as solved by Krohn-Rhodes decomposition of the semigroup of differential operators.

Whoops. That does already sound like gobbledegook, of the "reverse the dilitium crustals" variety. Suffice it to say that I agree with Ari N. Schulman for yet other reasons, that the Rapture of the Nerds is based on antique and reductionist toy problem misunderstandings of what a cell and a brain are. I prefer to struggle with the current literature and the current Math and the current experimental data, rather than be stuck in the 1956 vision of AI, which has failed so badly that John McCarthy, who coined the very term "Artificial INtelligence" has confessed to me that he wishes he'd never invented the phrase.

In fiction, I love what Mr. Stross does, and some of the btter Cyberpunk. But Ribopunk never latched on to the real Biology as well as, say, Greg Bear has used in novels. And there are some very good Biologists writing Science Fiction.

A lot of anti-suburb talk - but the only way suburbs are going to be abandoned is if (a) government screws the suburbs to force people into cities - politically unlikely; or (b) a true disaster occurs, destroying civil society.

Even at $20 a gallon, with the >50mpg cars that commuters would almost certainly adopt at that price, the price of fuel for commuting will be small compared to other costs of suburban living. If some flight to the cities happens, real estate market price shifts will quickly counter any urban advantage.

I guess there's one other way the suburbs could be abandoned - and that's if cities somehow became much more pleasant to live in - less obsessed with efficiency and privacy, more open to community and nature. Much less noisy. Much less feeling of continually needing to be wary against crime or other ways people might take advantage of one. Frankly, it wouldn't be THAT hard to beat the quality of surburban life, which sucks in many ways.

There are 4 possible outcomes for mankind, and one of them will happen soon:

1) The new 'breed' (cybernetic intelligence, AI, genetically augmented humans, or whatever they end up being) of humanity will exterminate us. Sounds a little alarmist, I know, but you don't see anyone today crying about the neanderthals or the dinosaurs.

2) The entire human race will be 'retired'. The new humans have some sense of ethics and put the rest of us in a 'home', where we are allowed to live out the rest of our natural lives in comfort and peace, but are not allowed to breed.

3) We are given the option of 'upgrading'. This is the 'merging completely with technology' scenario (and my personal preference).

4) Some combination of the above that would appear as a transformation. In other words, if humans combine directed evolution with augmented intelligence with emergent machine intelligence with ???, then it would appear in some ways that we had gone extinct (there are no longer 'humans' as we know them today), but doesn't actually entail us 'dying' in the classical sense.

Some points for reflection:

Alien civilizations do exist, and space exploration is possible (perhaps inevitable), just not in the way we envision it today. I read an article recently about how there's tons of previously undetected 'space dust' in interstellar space. Exactly three days before I read this article, I was musing to my friends about how we would explore space when the substrate for our collective intelligence could be reduced to the nanoscale, because then it becomes economically feasible to ride around on bursts of radiation (gamma rays, supernovaes, hard x-rays or whatever), and communication over a large scale can be achieved with quantum entanglement. The last line in the article, which was speculating as to how this space dust got there, read, 'It's possible that it was pushed there by light.' I make the premise that there are already advanced miniature (nanoscale or smaller) civilizations flying through the universe at or near light speed on tiny particles of 'dust', communicating via quantum entanglement over vast distances, and possibly seeding the universe with intelligence over long geological time scales.

Furthermore, time itself is an illusion of sorts. Most people assume that we (or any other living thing) perceive in 'whole' dimensions. So called 'time' is nothing more than the fraction of the 4th spatial dimension (hyperspace) that we can currently perceive. Whenever an organism perceives a fraction of a dimension, it ALWAYS appears as 'time'. The Singularity is going to 'stop' time, that is the 4th spatial dimension will no longer look like the 'arrow' of time to us, it will come to rest with the other three spatial dimensions (and then we will begin to perceive a fraction of the 5th spatial dimension, which will also appear as 'time' to us).

My last prediction is that total autonomy will come to all individuals as our technology reveals that scarcity economics is a complete lie, and all basic needs are automated by feedstock from nanoreplicators, extremely efficient solar power (or plasma fusion), and virtual online entertainment.

5) Resource depletion/epidemic/climate change-induced famine/other crises result in a population crash. End of human civilization, and resource depletion prevents subsequent civilizations from industrializing: possible extinction of H. Sapiens.

(Actually, that's options (5) - (10) inclusive, at least.)

11) Given that evolution is a random walk with a wall at one side (the selection pressure that weeds out "unfit" variants) we have no guarantee that our own future evolution is going to make us more intelligent, or otherwise enhance our survival fitness. And this goes for our memetic evolution, not just our genome.

There are probably some more options, but I'm kind of tired right now.

As to your final prediction, total autonomy is incompatible with civilization: even libertarians usually admit that their right to throw a punch at random without fear of retribution ends at the tip of my nose. If anything, I'd predict far more authoritarian surveillance and supervision -- especially if it turns out that scarcity economics is a lie and we can build nanoreplicators and efficient energy sources.

PS: you're not the first libertarian/futurist drive-by today. Where are you guys coming in from?

Hey Charles, btw just wanted to thank you for Accelerando and be a bit of a fanboy for just a sec. Found this site while checking out your new book at Amazon.

Anyway, I kinda rushed that comment (I'm hyped on coffee and cigs).

What do you think of Sorce Theory, Spinbitz, and all the buzz/hype about how classical physics and/or Einstein may (probably IS in my mind) be wrong about fundamental assumptions. This is completely game changing in my mind when it comes to the future.

I'm a strong believer in holographic/fractal cosmologies (and yes, I take absurd amounts of psychadelics).

I think complexity/intelligence is inevitable. It's my firm belief that so called black/holes or singularities are depositories for entropy. The universe deposits entropy, gets back complexity (for example, black holes are thought initiate galaxy formation by compressing gas into more highly complex states).

The problem with libertarianism is that it's STILL a form of government. Autonomy will occur when people reject all authority, and the first step is to reject one's own authority over others.

Yeah, I try not to think about your option 5 (if it happens, does it matter if I think about it?)...but I'm confident the nano-revolution will provide solutions to those problems...

Autonomy is not incompatible with civlization, it's absolutely necessary to it's continued survival. What will happen is that authority will become irrelevant. When someone throws a virtual punch at my virtual nose, I can choose whether or not to even register it.

Kurt9 @ 166: Although qualitative breakthroughs (including new applications of existing technologies) typically come from the efforts of individuals or small groups, the effective exploitation of such a breakthrough normally requires the resources of a much larger organization.

Example: Having a Lockeed-type "Skunk Works" conceptual development center won't get you very far toward a working fleet of high-performance air/space craft, without some substantial manufacturing capability to call on when you're ready to reduce concept to practice. On a less exalted note, how many "basement inventors" license production rights for their products to established manufacturers, as distinct from trying to set up their own industrial program from scratch?

What's really needed to make this type of development program work is an environment in which: (a) the administrative bureaucracy gets sufficiently out of the way of the creative and motivated individuals, for a long enough period of time, for those folks to actually get something done; (b) a knowledgeable manager can and does decide when the new item is sufficiently developed to justify moving it into production; and (c) the producer has the necessary capabilities (facilities, skills, capital, etc.) to accomplish timely and effecient production. Sometimes, all of this happens within a single organization; often these steps are distributed between two (or more) entities. Also, the entity/entities involved can be public, private, or hybrid, in pretty much any combination imaginable. (Please note that none of these attributes is a guarantee of organizational competence, at any level . . . )

Just wanted to apologize if I come off sounding like a fringe idealist. I like to think of the way my mind works as being very similar to the way the Drumemrs work from Diamond Age...I have a very strong intuitive/pattern recognition ability, but less logical/analytical ability. I'm often right, but have trouble explaining it in ways that are acceptable.

So anyway, I'll allow others who can nail this stuff down in ways I haven't quite learned how to do yet do it for me.

http://spinbitz.net/anpheon.org/
In 1965 there was a theory published which explained the nature of matter and energy using the motions, refractions and reflections of pressure waves in a continuous, compressible, frictionless, fluid, material medium.

http://www.spinbitz.net/#intro
SpinbitZ is an integral and thoroughly modern (e.g. post-metaphysical, post-foundational and post-coherentist) ontological and epistemological meta-paradigm which uses “vision-logic interfaces” for exploring and integrating the core concepts of --- and the bleeding-edges between --- mathematics, philosophy, science and art. It is a heavily illustrated and intuitively visual work based on an integration of the central trans-rational elements of Spinoza and Leibniz (hence SpinbitZ), catalyzed by the convergent thoughts of many others such as Gerald Lebau (author of Sorce Theory), Gilles Deleuze, Ken Wilber and R. Buckminster Fuller. It is further infused with the truths from many of the great wisdom traditions such as the concept of nonduality, Nagarjuna's "emptiness," the "Two Truths Doctrine," and an operationalized version the Taoist "identity of opposites,"all of which are invaluable for working with the crucial concept of polarity and expanding the project of rationalism beyond the distorting lens of the post-modern era.

The goal of SpinbitZ, with its "Nondual Rationalism," is to reconnect to the prematurely abandoned project of philosophical and mathematical rationalism, with its unrecognized roots and resonances in both Western empiricism and the nondual philosophies of the East, such as Taoism and Madhyamaka (middle-path) Buddhism. This critical project was aborted through the "modern" and "post-modern" historical misinterpretations (and in many cases, just plain ignorance) of the key embryonic insights and conceptual tools developed mainly by Spinoza and expanded (in a reactionary and somewhat confused way) through Leibniz (among others). These misinterpretations (of what is better termed “Nondual Rational-Empiricism”), incorporated wholesale into modern academia, were fostered by the reactionary anti-modern and anti-rational movements such as the "infinite representation" and negative dialectic of Hegelian “absolute idealism” and the absolutized relativism of deconstructive postmodernism.

http://www.suppressedscience.net/
Historically, there were few scientific breakthroughs that were not violently opposed, condemned and strongly resisted. Every scientist knows this, Thomas Kuhn has written a book about it that is considered a classic, and yet the pattern keeps repeating itself. Many mainstream scientists these days believe that science has essentially reached 'the end of the road', that everything that can be understood has been understood, and that therefore claims to genuinely revolutionary discoveries must necessarily be erroneous or fraudulent.

JvP @ 169
I THINK you've misunderstood me.
A SINGLE neuron CAN be modelled.
BUT a vast swarm of them, multiply connected, cannot - or not in the immediate future, at least.
I agree with your poins about "reductionist problems" but I think that people, incuding you, are looking at the wrong problem(s)

Relatively soon, but not yet. First, a simpler single cell (yeast or bacterium) has to be modeled, high resolution (space and time). Despite several labs in several countries competing, that has not yet happened.

To do so requires some very sophisticated Math, not mere brute force numerical integration of the differential equations, because of the huge number of orders of magnitudes of both time and space involved.

We agree about the faults of reductionism. But you probably can't reasonably know that I'm looking at the wrong problems, unless you read a few of my 20 or so mathematical biology papers. Partial list available upon email request, but too technical for this blog. Mr. Stross understands the biochemistry (a Pharmacology degree will do that) and the software issues. But this is getting off-subject, except so far as what we do or do not think will happen this century.

JvP @ 177
Agreed - and disagreed.
I was talking about modelling the pure signal processing that a neuron performs, not the entire structure of the cell.
But then, my first degree is in Physics, so you might expect a different viewpoint.
So, I maintain, that from a signal-processing point of view, a Neuron can (or very soon will be) modelled completely adequately.
The problems of the massive parallel and feedback interconnections when you've got however-many-of-them-are-in-a-human-brain is another story altogether.....

Greg. Tingey- actually, no. A single neuron cannot be wholly modeled because we simply *don't know* everything that goes on in a neuron, not to mention all the different kinds of neurons. We can currently do a somewhat reliable model of a neuron, although it takes massive computing power. But since any massive parallel self modifying firmware system like the brain is inherently chaotic small deviations on the cellular scale can(and will) lead to large deviations on the network scale.

Greg. Tingley@178: the problem is that with neurons the signal processing is intimately tied up with its physical structure. The effects of any change, from the density of certain kind of ion channel to the spatial structure of the dendrite tree, can be staggering.

An additional problem with modeling neurons and using them in a model of neural computation is that a neuron's output is not only affected by the synapses coming in, but also by the bath of neurochemicals it sits in, and the dynamic (and spatially variable) contents of that bath are determined by complex feedback processes that include the computations of the neurons.

back to the urbs for a mo
There is a lot to be said for high density living, as long as it is designed for people and not chickens.
There are certain natural size constraints that would dictate how communities might be implimented, Either in distance and time, or in numbers of people you can know (200). Distance relates to the size at which you can still identify a person (400m), time how long you are prepared to walk on a short errand, (5min, 10min).

If you lump people up on this small scale, how do they have the freedom to know about and travel to the next locus, where people do things slightly different. And if they like the people/ ideas better over there, how easy is it to rearrange their lives to cut down the commute?

Disucss?

A lot of greater london is built on the pattern of filling in successfully smaller loci of varying ages as communities of a sort, with lots mixed use. Travel still isn't that easy rotationally, rather than axially, but then the centre with its unique institutions attracts many people.

The wikipedia link you give to the Westphalian settlement in the answer to the Politics question should probably be going instead to the Westphalian sovereignty article. Quite honestly, while Westphalia can probably reasonably be seen as the start of our current international system, I am at a loss as to why the standard view of sovereignty should ever have been seen as starting there - the treaty actually detailed a set of institutions that allowed France, Sweden and Austria to intervene in the internal affairs of most of the other "sovereign" signatories almost at will.

My answer to your problem re Westphalia, Peter, can be summed up as "There are some myths about history which you couldn't kill with a stick" - and the myths that have been accepted as fact by at least one branch of social sciences (in this case, IR) have got extra-special zombie abilities.

Go for the head shot - question it every time you see it, especially when the person repeating it is more than usually amenable to reason and evidence.

Nanocarbon modeling may be the next step to building a synthetic brain

The team already has designed and simulated the transistor circuits for a single synapse, said Hsu, a senior member of the team and Ph.D. student in electrical engineering. In addition, a complementary metal oxide semiconductor chip that will be used to validate the concepts is about to be fabricated. Now it’s time to connect the structure to another synapse and study neural interconnectivity. By the end of the semester, she hopes to have “several synthetic neurons talking to each other.”

The world was different 20 years ago. German radio reported these days that many teenagers have only a vague idea that back then, Germany was cut in half by a daunting wall. On a lighter note, today's kids may also have difficulties to imagine that there was no WorldWideWeb at that time.

I want to emphasize that modeling a neuron in high resolution spaciotemporally, in the context of the wet chemistry and interaction with other cells, is not just of academic interest, or for skepticism on The Rapture of the Nerds, or for buzzwords in cyberpunk.

It is literally a matter of life or death.

One of my major threads of refereed research since no later than 1980 was in the medical applications to such simulation.

Proc Annu Symp Comput Appl Med Care. 1980 November 5; 1: 51–59. PMCID: PMC2203661
Simulation of Metabolic Dynamics
Jonathan V. Post
Full textFull text is available as a scanned copy of the original print version. Get a printable copy (PDF file) of the complete article (1020K)

I nearly died in January 2008, spent 11 days in hospital, and am (admittedly behind schedule) in submitting a paper coauthored with the surgeon who saved my life.

There are neurobiological phenomena which, to a reductionist, look trivial. But to the doctor in the emergency room, it is exceedingly hard to tell one disease from another. The doctor must choose, and a wrong choice can be irreversible.

Mr. Stross has written that this kind of issue pushed him away from Pharmacology. On a good day, you've not threatened a patient's life.

Long before a squid is uploaded into cyberspace, there will be medical applications. The sensors worn by astronauts in Mercury and Gemini evolved into what you find in most hospitals today, as Robert A. Heinlein explained to the U.S. Congress.

Similarly, the biological modeling software now in labs will be part of the Little Black Bag within the decade.

I do not believe that there's a Singularity in the 21st Century. But I do believe that the first trillion dollars will be spent by a million rich people spending a million dollars each for customized automated genomic preoteomic AI super-medicine, as Dr. Leroy Hood explains (and why Bill Gates hired him away from Chairing Biology at Caltech).

The next trillion dollars will be spent by ten million upper middle class people spending a a hundred thousand dollars each for customized automated genomic preoteomic AI super-medicine.

The poor will always be with us, even in an economy of abundance. But some of the rich will live much healthier and longer lives.

There may be someone alive today who is, by conventional terms, immortal.

I feel that I am saving lives in the classroom, but that can't be known for 10-20 years. I do want my research to save lives in hospitals.

If some of this keeps finding its way into my science fiction, fine. But stories are merely fun. Understanding -- REALLY understanding a single cell -- is part of the revolution that this century depends on.

JvP: I disagree on the importance of modelling neurons, at least for mind uploading.

Yes, we need to know what they do and how they do it. But to simulate a neuron for functional purposes you don't need to simulate every individual receptor site on each axon any more than to emulate an Atari ST on a PC you need to simulate the effects of heat build-up in the components on its PCB. There's a level (or levels) which are of interest, and levels below that which are of no interest other than insofar as they contribute an overall weighting effect (e.g. ambient hormone and neurotransmitter levels in the extracellular medium the cell is perfused by) or mere noise (occasional spontaneous conformational changes in receptor sites).

Medical applications are as different from the questions surrounding uploading or simulation as, say, veterinary medicine pertaining to seagulls is from engine maintenance in Boeing 737s.

Charlie
EXACTLY
I was talking about the Signal-Processing (and storage and retreival) aspects of a single neuron.
ONLY.

There is still a problem, though.
The one I've already mentioned. The neurons are NOT simply connected, they are multiply connected, in a way that no electronic macine is, in any sense or form that we are even near to contemplating.
Tat's the real strong AI problem, and it's going to take time before it is solved, if ever.
I thnk it will be solved, but not in the next 10 or 15 years.
Maybe 30 or 40, but I'll be lucky to be alive, 40 years from now - though I hope to be .....

Greg: not only are neurons multiply connected, but the connections are self-modifying and we may have been missing 90% of them in the past by ignoring microtubule structures and glial cells and making the normative (but probably incorrect) assumption that individual neurons run on a single neurotransmitter type (rather than possibly switching -- or convoluting -- different neurotransmitter-mediated signals in a single cell).

I think we stand a good chance of making headway on remediating the ageing process long before we crack the issues surrounding mind or AI (with the proviso that whenever we learn how to do something that we do, it stops being AI and becomes ordinary computer science: if we ever run low on stuff we consider to be AI, that'll be a sign that we've mostly cracked the problem without realizing it).

I do think that the 90% classically ignored in glial cells is as important of the 90% of the cosmic mass missed by only looking at luminous matter. I'm not sure after all these years about microtubules and whether there is consciousness hiding in nonlinearities of relativistic schrodinger equations or whatever exactly Penrose is saying, but nano-scale does matter.

#14. And how are those complete cell simulation models going? I know some folk trying to do it with massive Beowulf clusters, and they are not doing it at the molecular level. Now, scale that up to include intercellular media, signalling molecules, at roughly ten billion instances, plus all the molecular structures of incoming food and air and water.

When you can manipulate that, or even just a single cell, on your laptop in real time, come and talk. A 3d model of a virus (but not of the physical properties of the atoms as such, just general rules) is nothing compared to that. Consider the folding problem - we can't do it properly for single large molecules. Now factor in hundreds of trillions of instances in a single cell.

Moore's Law is way too simple for the combinatorics to ever work out in our lifetimes. But here's a way to simulate all that in real time: build an actual copy. No computers are needed, and it works the right way every time!

JvP: I'm not talking about Penrose's quantum foo-foo (which I think is probably rubbish -- reading Penrose's first two books, he basically deployed the Wookie defense rather than defining consciousness and explaining why it's not computationally tractable) but about tunnelling nanotubes. Speculative, I know, but they've been observed in human tissue -- which suggests there's something we were unaware of until 2004 going on and I suspect if it occurs in kidney cells we'll probably find something similar going on in the brain.

There's a lot of stuff we just don't understand in cytology: for example, what do vault organelles do?

I'm more open to Stuart R. Hameroff on microtubules, and your points on tunnelling nanotubes and vault organelles are well taken. Short answer: I don't know, but agree with the quality of your questions.

I allegedly had a paper on biophysics of non-steady-state biological "AC Chemistry" [a term that I coined before it was apparently rediscovered published and elsewhere] in a Proceedings of a Stuart Hameroff-led NATO Conference somewhere in the 1979-1984 era. But none of the companies for whom I worked then and in the next few years (Boeing, Rockwell) had technical librarians who could find the citation, let alone a copy of the proceedings.

Anyone with microtubules of either quantum or classical nature in their brains have an idea? I'd really be grateful.

Thanks for the broad brush-stroke; it helps me to see where you're coming from. Especially the bit about government-funded bureaucracies. (You're an American libertarian, I take it? How quaint.)

I never said anything about libertarianism. I just said that government-funded bureaucracies do not work. One does not have to be a libertarian to see this. All of the big government science projects have failed to accomplish anything. NASA, Tokamak fusion, the war on cancer. Having been involved in space politics in the late 80's as well as having worked in defense industry about the same time, I can tell you that this kind of system does not and cannot work.

Several friends of mine (who are WAY more libertarian than I am) have worked in the government funded R&D milieu. They tell me that none of the stuff has any chance of working. This is why they have quit and have moved on to do other things.

Charles, you are correct about space colonization in the sense that it will never happen as long as NASA exists. The same can be said about the Tokamak (ITER) and the development of commercial fusion power.

I have worked for both small and large companies. Every large company I have worked for as well as those I have sold into have been dysfunctional bureaucracies. I have found this to be even more true for any governmental entity I have ever dealt with.

You think that I am a "libertarian". To tell you the truth, I did read Ayn Rand once (a long time ago). I didn't even like her that much. I know about the ranty and raviness of libertarian people. In response to this, I will tell you this:

All large scale human institutions are bureaucracies. The public ones worse than the private ones, the larger ones worse than the smaller ones. Bureaucracy is inherently dysfunctional (this is a law of nature that appears to be rooted in human nature). Thus, any political philosophy that is based on the efficacy of large institutions (and thus bureaucracy) is, by definition, completely flawed and unworkable. I don't know if this makes me a libertarian or not.

My experience with Europe and Europeans is based on those who are expats in Asia as well as my business trips to Europe. I have several good friends (expats in Asia) who are from Germany, Austria, and France. They tell me that it is much more difficult to start a business in Europe than it is in the U.S. or various Asian countries. That's why they are expats in Asia.

I will also tell you about the pilot I met on a recent flight to Singapore. He is French and left France some time ago to pursue his dream of being a pilot. You see, he graduated from college and became a biology teacher. Later, he wanted to change careers. He told me that in France this is next to impossible. He said that once you make a career choice, you are pigeon-holed for life. This is why he left. He first lived in the U.S. and Canada, then later Singapore (where he flew for a start-up, JetStar Airlines). He said that the Frence system, where there is no freedom and openness to do new things in life, is "soul-destroying".

I think I will stand by my previous comments.

NB: you do not need to quote Heinlein at me; you may or may not have noticed that my last SF novel (Saturn's Children) was a Heinlein pastiche ... on the subject of space colonization. If you want to berate me for my perceived beliefs, you might like to take a look at the book first?

I quoted Heinlein because it matched my own experiences in life. This credit bubble that the U.S. (and to a lesser extent Europe) had was fake. I knew it was fake. Everytime I returned to the U.S. (I lived in Japan at the time) I could not understand how everyone could buy all of the fancy crap that people did. Then came the crash. The bubble was fueled by stupid people and the crash is being stage managed by stupid people as well. Dumb and dumber.

The real idiots are the people who believe in "Keynesian" economics. The bubble was an artificial market distortion. It was fake. It never represented anything real. The people who advocate "keynesian" stimulus are trying to recreate something that is fake. This cannot work. The bubble and collapse is identical to the one in Japan. This means no one ever learns anything ever. Is it not understandable that people like me want to get away from the idiots that surround us?

Charlie @ 195: The ability to model and simulate neurons is important for uploading because the commonly-accepted argument that uploading is even possible is the one that Kurzweil uses: the old chestnut of replacing neurons one by one with software simulations, until the entire brain is simulated, at which point the mind executing on that brain has been uploaded. But it assumes as given that simulating neurons at the required level of detail is easy. I contend that a) even at relatively coarse levels of detail it's complicated because of the number and variety of connections, and b) we don't know what level of detail is required, and won't for quite some time. We would need to at least understand the role of microtubules, whatever it may be, and to know how neurons change their behavior (not just their state) in reaction to changes in inputs and cellular environment.

And there's always the possibility that quantum effects* play a part in neuronal operation that we don't know about. It's certainly the case that there are a lot of quantum effects involved in cellular metabolism (proton tunneling for instance, and the operation of rhodopsin in photoreceptivity, and chlorophyll in photosynthesis). And quantum effects are very hard for us to simulate on computers.

Having been skeptical, I'll turn around and point out that it's entirely possible that the modeling of neurons will be relatively easy on a quantum computer; Feynman originally thought of them as a way to simulate quantum processes in realtime.

* No, I'm not talking about Penrose's quantum gravity in microtubules; I'm even more skeptical of that than you are.

We're currently running up against the limits of rational self interest (to the extent it ever worked at all without a bit of wink-wink-nudge-nudge). Old school religion is back in force because it's what people know works, but just wait until the new stuff starts scaling up.

Crazy? Yes, exactly. Here are some examples.

The production of information does not happen efficiently within the rational model. You either get idiotic corrupt systems such as copyright, or far less effort allocated to information production than is ideal. But suppose information production were instead tied into a set of quasi-religious beliefs, an act of devotion rather than rational self interest. People would produce information simply because they believed it was the right thing to do.

Another example. We seem to be having difficulty building infrastructure for the long term. It's hard to make a case for good infrastructure in capitalist terms, it's hard to get people with money to back it. The old fashioned solution is very simple: have everyone believe in a duty to leave good infrastructure for future generations.

Finally, since biotechnology is getting cheap and widely accessible, it would be in our interests to make sure it is not used for evil or simply irresponsibly. Certainly some form of government oversight will be involved, but I think our first line of defense should be inside people's heads. Vernor Vinge's SHE-who-must-be-obeyed, but with meat.

So my prediction for our personal experience of this century is that it will involve a lot of big weird causes to get intimately involved in, and a lot of believing in strange things. And that this need not be a bad thing, in much the same way that nuclear technology need not be a bad thing. There is actually a win scenario here.

Oh, and it would be a good idea to get a good theoretical understanding of this kind of thing *before* we create AI. The idea of a rational self-interested AI scares the pants off me.

I had a quick look at info on Beowulf clusters, and was profoundly dissapointed.
I realise there is a huge heat-dissipation problem to overcome, but the interconnections are pathetic.

What is REALLY needed, are much smaller, lower-power processors (like in the original PC's, or even before - with only say 1k-to-100k of memory)
BUT
Built up in a large cube, say 100 or 1000 processors-a-side, and, inside the "block" each and every processor must be connected to all adjacent ones: - that is across all six faces, and all eight vertices.
THEN see what sort of signal-processing and information-handling capability you have?

kurt9 @ 201:
The gov't bureaucracies are successful: they just aren't necessarily doing what they claim to be doing ...

e.g. NASA: very successful in getting to the Moon. Successful on a small scale (rovers, etc) since then. Successful in supporting the military ... but manned space, developing space ? nah. Why not ? perhaps because they, or the administration, don't really want to develop space?

Ditto lots of "big science": CERN, Fermilab, ESA, the synchrontrons, etc. all work well, quietly in the background, making advances that could not be done other ways. Others, such as US military R&D mostly ceased having a purpose but live on, zombie like, delivering tax dollars to big business because of lobbying.

In politics, especially US politics, there are multiple constituencies to be satisfied and long-term (>4 yrs) projects only succeed because multiple players see an advantage. NASA continues with space shuttles, ISS, etc. despite a lack of whitehouse support because it provides jobs (the ISS has components manufactured in all 435 congressional districts!).

The main reason for the lack of development of space (beyond satellites) is lack of profit. Never mind startups: "NASA" is primarily a funding agency: it doesn't construct rockets or spacecraft itself: Boeing, Lockheed, etc. do. If there was money to be made, how come _they_, who could (at least until recently) fund all "new space" projects like Space-X, etc. out of pocket change, have avoided it ? After all, they know the business better than anyone ...

kurt9: I think you're drawing incorrect conclusions from self-selected samples that support your basic thesis. On Europe, and flexibility, it varies from country to country: I'm on my third career, here in the UK, and I know folks from various parts of Europe proper who've also done the career-shift thing or founded start-ups. Talking to one guy from one country who ran into problems with his personal proposed career shift and solved them by emigrating doesn't give you a representative sample of life in 26 different countries with widely varying cultures and local career and legislative systems. There's a reason folks choose Silicon Valley or Boston to base their computer or biotech start-ups, rather than picking the back woods of Louisiana or North Dakota: the externalities differ radically between US states, never mind EU nations.

I'm with Alastair @206 on bureaucracies: NASA, for example, isn't about colonizing space -- it's about maintaining a national infrastructure of aerospace R&D engineers in a time when propulsion technologies have topped out (and most such would be looking for new lines of work), with a side-order of planetography, and a whole meaty slab of pork-barrel politics on top.

Paul Harrison: yes, and for a picture of what you're talking about you might want to read "The Caryatids" by Bruce Sterling (which came out this month) ...

Khannea Suntzu: piss off, troll. (Future postings of yours will be deleted, if they're in a similar mode.)

For the record: I think the H+ types are basiclaly religious nutters, much like the Randroids. The real world is a whole lot more complex than they understand, and while there's undoubtedly going to be a lot of change in the next fifty years, I doubt the emerging picture will look anything like what they pray for.

The ability to model and simulate neurons is important for uploading because the commonly-accepted argument that uploading is even possible is the one that Kurzweil uses: the old chestnut of replacing neurons one by one with software simulations, until the entire brain is simulated, at which point the mind executing on that brain has been uploaded.

Why bother to do that? Do the neurons 'know' who they are connected to? Of course not. All you need is a similar neuron in somebody else's head, or being simulated in another computer. In fact, none of the neurons need be interacting with each other at all; you still get a simulated consciousness.

But it assumes as given that simulating neurons at the required level of detail is easy. I contend that a) even at relatively coarse levels of detail it's complicated because of the number and variety of connections, and b) we don't know what level of detail is required, and won't for quite some time. We would need to at least understand the role of microtubules, whatever it may be, and to know how neurons change their behavior (not just their state) in reaction to changes in inputs and cellular environment.

For all we know at this point, consciousness, or AI, could be done at the functional block level if you just knew how: Just get some pattern recognizers of various sorts hooked up, some logic processing, voice recognition and speech synthesizing modules, and voila! Instant AI!

I suspect that for practical purposes, most people will be perfectly happy with zimboes; in fact, prefer them. None of that nasty haggling over what constitutes abuse or slavery. It's interesting to note the number of hits the Turing test has taken over the years, btw. Thirty years ago, arguing that a machine that could pass the test was ipso facto proof that it was 'intelligent'. These days, not so much. Instead, you get the usual 'But that's not really an example of [fill in the blank]'. Anthropoidal robots that can mow your lawn, clean your gutters, wash the dishes, do the laundry? Unlike a number of other advances, this one I'm rather optimistic about. In fact, machines that could hold fairly sophisticated conversations on a number of limited topics don't seem implausible. But I predict that when this happens, no one will argue that this constitutes an advance in 'true' AI.

"it's entirely possible that the modeling of neurons will be relatively easy on a quantum computer; Feynman originally thought of them as a way to simulate quantum processes in realtime."

I've published separate refereed papers on Feynman's being the great grandfather of Nanotechnology AND great grandfather of Quantum Computing, with the usual references plus personal anecdotes from our times together in the late 1960s and after. What I can't say with certainty is if he linked the two nascent fields. Quantum Computers have not evolved the way that he suggested, but one of the libertarian-leaning Fathers of Quantum Computing, David Elieser Deutsch FRS Oxford, pioneered the field of quantum computers by being the first person to formulate a specifically quantum computational algorithm, and is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

I have asked Prof. Scott Aaronson and Dr. George Hockney and Prof. Dave Bacon and other QC experts if their work bears on analysis of the brain, and the putative singularity. I still don't know.

Analsysis aside for moment, there's the issue of synthesis -- maybe retrofitting new capabilities into our existing brains biologically (as well as brain-computer interface). That seems to be advancing.

They have assembled different types of genetically engineered cells into synthetic microtissues that can perform functions such as secreting and responding to hormones, promising more complex biological capabilities than a single cell alone could produce.

"This is like another level of hierarchical complexity for synthetic biology," said coauthor Carolyn Bertozzi, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology and director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "People used to think of the cell as the fundamental unit. But the truth is that there are collections of cells that can do things that no individual cell could ever be programmed to do. We are trying to achieve the properties of organs now, though not yet organisms."

In fact, none of the neurons need be interacting with each other at all; you still get a simulated consciousness.

Sorry, I don't understand this sentence at all. How can one neuron by itself, let alone ten billion of them with no connection to each other do anything? The brain isn't just neurons, it's neurons connected by synapses (and some other things). If you're trying to upload a brain, things will be changing even as you're recording them, the only way to keep the upload and the original in synch long enough to get a faithful upload is to simulate as you go (and the critical time here is measured in single-digit milliseconds at the longest.).

I think a lot of people forget that the brain isn't a static bunch of memory devices with a processor hanging off it; the brain's architecture bears no relationship whatsoever to the classic von Neumann computer architecture.

Greg @ 205: What you're talking about existed at one time; starting about 1985 or so, up to the late 90s, they were made by a company called N-Cube. The original design, done in 1983-84 used a single chip containing one 32-bit processor about as powerful as an 8086 (but a RISC instruction set), with 10 high-speed serial I/O channels. The system could contain up to 1024 of the chips, connected as the vertices in a ten-dimensional hypercube. Smaller configurations were lower-dimensional hypercubes with smaller numbers of nodes, the minimum was a 4-cube with 16 processors. I know quite a bit about the system because I worked at Intel with 5 of the engineers who started the company, including the 3 principals. As far as I can tell the company was basically trashed by Larry Ellison, of Oracle fame, who bought N-Cube and apparently pushed the original people out.

With current chip technology and packaging it should be possible to build a system with that architecture that maxed out in a 20-dimensional cube using 1 million nodes each running at more than 1,000x the instructions per second (and able to do floating point too; the original was integer only) or even bigger if you were willing to build such a system. And there were some cute ideas that Danny Hillis built into the Connection Machine in the late '80s that could be added in to improve communications between non-adjacent nodes.

In general, parallel processing was set back about 20 years when Intel decided not to seriously pursue it, largely because it couldn't compete with uniprocessor solutions running commercial applications. Myopic, no?

Perhaps the most significant and influential parallel computer system of the early 1980s was the Caltech Cosmic Cube, developed by Charles Seitz and Geoffrey Fox.... The hypercube work at Caltech originated in May 1981 when Fox attended a seminar by Carver Mead on VLSI and its implications for concurrency.... Fox realized that he could use parallel computers for the lattice gauge computations that were central to his research at the time and that his group was running on a VAX 11/780. During the summer of 1981, he and his students worked out an algorithm that he thought would be parallel and tried it out on his VAX (simulating parallelism). The natural architecture for the problems he wanted to compute was determined to 4x4x4 e a three-dimensional grid, which happens to be 64 processors.... In summary, the hypercube family of computers enjoyed rapid development and was used for scientific applications from the beginning. In the period from 1982 to 1987, three generations of the family were designed, built, and put into use at Caltech. The third generation (the Mark III) even included a switch of microprocessor families. Within the same five years, four commercial vendors produced and delivered computers with hypercube architectures. By 1987, approximately 50 major applications had been completed on Caltech hypercubes. Such rapid development and adaption has few if any parallels.... hypercubes were produced by Intel, nCUBE, Ametek, and Floating Point Systems Corporation in the mid-1980s....

There's some discussion at n-Category cafe related to what is really going on in the mind:

"... I suggest that what we call a 'concept' is akin to an attractor in the space of all possible concepts (ideocosm) that many trajectories of changing representations of concepts almost always stay close to...."

Perhaps the most significant and influential parallel computer system of the early 1980s was the Caltech Cosmic Cube, developed by Charles Seitz and Geoffrey Fox.... The hypercube work at Caltech originated in May 1981 when Fox attended a seminar by Carver Mead on VLSI and its implications for concurrency.... Fox realized that he could use parallel computers for the lattice gauge computations that were central to his research at the time and that his group was running on a VAX 11/780. During the summer of 1981, he and his students worked out an algorithm that he thought would be parallel and tried it out on his VAX (simulating parallelism). The natural architecture for the problems he wanted to compute was determined to 4x4x4 e a three-dimensional grid, which happens to be 64 processors.... In summary, the hypercube family of computers enjoyed rapid development and was used for scientific applications from the beginning. In the period from 1982 to 1987, three generations of the family were designed, built, and put into use at Caltech. The third generation (the Mark III) even included a switch of microprocessor families. Within the same five years, four commercial vendors produced and delivered computers with hypercube architectures. By 1987, approximately 50 major applications had been completed on Caltech hypercubes. Such rapid development and adaption has few if any parallels.... hypercubes were produced by Intel, nCUBE, Ametek, and Floating Point Systems Corporation in the mid-1980s....

There's some discussion at n-Category cafe related to what is really going on in the mind:

"... I suggest that what we call a 'concept' is akin to an attractor in the space of all possible concepts (ideocosm) that many trajectories of changing representations of concepts almost always stay close to...."

Sorry, I don't understand this sentence at all. How can one neuron by itself, let alone ten billion of them with no connection to each other do anything? The brain isn't just neurons, it's neurons connected by synapses (and some other things). If you're trying to upload a brain, things will be changing even as you're recording them, the only way to keep the upload and the original in synch long enough to get a faithful upload is to simulate as you go (and the critical time here is measured in single-digit milliseconds at the longest.).

Say you've got your brain in a jar doing just what you want it to; what changes if you outfit each synapse in each neuron with a tiny radio that converts synaptic activity into an EM signal and vice versa? Then instead of synapse to synapse communication, the pathway is synapse -> transmitter -> receiver -> synapse. Is anything really changed? Is there some quality such that an individual neuron would 'know' that it was getting a facsimile (or a facsimile of a facsimile if you assume this is an upload) communication instead of the real thing? Surely you don't think this, do you?

So given an advanced enough state of the art, would anything change if the individual neurons were separated by several meters, as long as the radio links between each individual synapse remained intact? Wouldn't it be possible to have each neuron in it's own jar? I'm assuming we're going with the Kurzweilian view here that you've described, not your own opinions personally, of course.

My thought is that this scenario does preserve the original intelligence/consciousness/animal spirits, at least this is what I would think someone like Kurzweil would agree with. Is this a reasonable supposition?

With current chip technology and packaging it should be possible to build a system with that architecture that maxed out in a 20-dimensional cube using 1 million nodes each running at more than 1,000x the instructions per second (and able to do floating point too; the original was integer only) or even bigger if you were willing to build such a system. And there were some cute ideas that Danny Hillis built into the Connection Machine in the late '80s that could be added in to improve communications between non-adjacent nodes.

Why are the preferred connections the edges of a cube? Why not a tetrahedron? Is there some sort of advantage for the type of problems this machine is working on?

In general, parallel processing was set back about 20 years when Intel decided not to seriously pursue it, largely because it couldn't compete with uniprocessor solutions running commercial applications. Myopic, no?

Speaking as someone who is outside the field, I thought that the big problem was that no one had any good ideas for making parallel processing work in a general setting, i.e., there wasn't a good way to write programs to take advantage of parallel computing.

217
The whole point is you DON'T PROGRAMME IT AT ALL.
Or, rather you give it minimum basic (No pun intended) programming, hook it up to as many sensors and info-sources as you can, including an always-on connection to the Web, plus of, course visual (right-across-the-spectrum) i/o and sound i/o.
Then wait a bit, and see if anything happens?

There is no doubt that it WOULD process conventional materials faster, though, isn't there?

I was thinking of a practical experiment.

I shouldn't have been suprised to find that someone beat me to it, and very depressed that the idea got killed.
Is there any real progress in this field at present, or is it just a talking-shop, with everyone stuck in conventional serial van Neumann models?

216: "... a tiny radio that converts synaptic activity into an EM signal and vice versa?"

Hardly know where to start on this one. Evolution has good "reasons" (to abusively use a teleological word) for separating the electrochemical wave action of axons (1st order model is Hodgkin–Huxley equations (about as close to F=mA as anything in Biology) from the quantum molecular action in synaptic gaps.

Again, there's plenty of clear and correct exposition on the web about microneuroanatomny and microneurochemistry. Nor are you one of my high school students of Chem, Bio, Anatomy & Physiology (as I taught Sep-Dec 2008). But, as Charles Stross, Bruce Cohen et al have said, the typical CS geek utterly misunderstand what neurons ARE, and how utterly unlike silicon-based hardware they are in every regard.

This quarter (late March-mid June 2009) I'm to teach "Advanced Math" full time at a predominantly Latino high school. And I'm pretty sure that this is not a Blath (blog for Math).

Suffice it for now to suggest that Biology and Math are coupled as productively in 21st century as Physics and Math were coupled in 17th-20th centuries. But not the way that Kurzweil et al believe.

Protein folding was mentioned earlier. This month a breakthrough was announced.

Sigh. You don't have to 'start anywhere'. In fact, you can assume that these are perfect transceivers for whatever degree of accuracy you demand - this is an ontological question, not a question of mechanics. If this is true, then the neurons don't have to be in physical proximity, yes? I'm speaking from the Kurzweilian viewpoint. And if the neurons don't have to be in physical proximity, they can be housed in their own separate nutritive media, spaced meters apart for convenience.

The whole point is you DON'T PROGRAMME IT AT ALL.
Or, rather you give it minimum basic (No pun intended) programming, hook it up to as many sensors and info-sources as you can, including an always-on connection to the Web, plus of, course visual (right-across-the-spectrum) i/o and sound i/o.
Then wait a bit, and see if anything happens?

I'm just asking why the components are connected the same way the corners of a cube are connected. Tetrahedral connections would seem to be more 'natural', but I'm sure there's a reason why this isn't so.

220: If "neurons don't have to be in physical proximity" then WHAT is signaled from many to many? If the signal molecules and the memory molecules are both proteins, mediated by genes, mediated by spooky QM, then why pretend that this can be coded usefully in radio messages? Different KIND of coding, in not just mechanical but indeed ontological and epistemological ways.

221 and before: "Tetrahedral connections would seem to be more 'natural'"

ScentOfViolets @ 216: A single neuron is a nonlinear system whose transfer function we can not model well because we don't know what all the inputs and outputs are, or precisely what the transfer function(s) are. A neuronal circuit is a nonlinear chaotic dynamic system, squared and cubed if it has more than one feedback path (and as far as I know, they all do). What this means is that even for a simple neuronal circuit (say, the proverbial signifier for a single concept), it is not possible to model that circuit correctly (note: I didn't say "exactly") after some small number of computational time periods (and we're not even sure what that is, there's no global clock in the brain as far as we know).

This is because the error in computing simulations of nonlinear chaotic systems increases in error exponentially with linear increase in time. Because the trajectory of such a system through its state space "folds over" after a few iterations, it's not long before it is impossible not only to predict to within the limits of the "basin of attraction" it's currently in where the state will be (or even when or if it might jump to another basin), but also what its trajectory, and therefore its next state will be.

In the incremental simulation (upload) situation there are two sources of error: measurement error (inaccuracy, nonlinearity, and noise in the measurement transducers, including digitization noise), and inaccuracy in the model. Unless you know perfectly what the model's parameters are and what their values are, the model will be useless in a very short time. This means that you can't simulate one or more neurons accurately enough to know that the model is behaving the same way as the neurons it's simulating; consequently an incremental upload can not be faithful to the original unless it takes place completely in a few milliseconds, which is a constraint I don't believe can be overcome in this century.

ScentOfViolets: re JvP's 222: Only a single type of polytope (generalization of a polygon or polyhedron to arbitrary dimension) which regularly tesselates the space it's embedded in results in all vertices having the same number of edges. This means in an n-cube topology computer that all nodes (computers) communicate directly with the same number of other nodes, which simplifies multiple-hop communication hardware, and makes the communication latency deterministic, making synchronization among nodes ever so much easier (and believe me, this is a huge win in designing both hardware and software). Now it's a proven theorem in n-dimensional geometry that in spaces higher than R3 the only polytope that regularly tesselates that n-space is the n-cube. So any other topology does not allow each node to communicate with the same number of other nodes in larger systems.

you can assume that these are perfect transceivers for whatever degree of accuracy you demand - this is an ontological question, not a question of mechanics.

Not so, per my post at 224. To be "perfect enough" would require infinite accuracy, which is simply not physically possible. It's an ontological description with no possible referent in the physical universe. This is the sort of situation that shows why Platonism breaks down when you try to apply it to the objective universe: the universe doesn't have to play by our philosophical rules.

Bruce, read what I wrote again: the assumption is that Kurzweil is correct. Let me repeat this: I am assuming Kurzweil is correct. I am not trying to show that he is. Care to take a whack at my question, now that we know what the assumptions are?

wrt topological connections:

This still doesn't make sense, given that the processors are taken to be the vertices of a single n-gon, eg a single hypercube, or a single hyper-hypercube. A single simpicial complex of whatever degree has the same property, and moreover, this is the maximal possible number of connections (that's how you can build the things in (co)homological algebra.) To put it in less fancy terminology, to get a tetrahedron, you connect each of four processors to the other three. To get a 'four dimensional' tetrahedron, you connect each of five processors to the other four, and so on.

If there were more n-cubes stuck together, you might have a point. But I've never heard of such a thing. Have you?

Yes, IIRC the Connection Machine was set up to allow multiple n-cubes to be connected together. You're right, though, for single cubes that isn't a factor. I got carried away with the word "tesselation".

As for accepting Kurzweil's argument, sure, the incremental simulation model works fine if you assume what he assumes. I'm not sure what your question is, if you make that assumption.

Fully connected or all-to-all
This is the most powerful interconnection network ( topology ): each node is directly connected to ALL other nodes.

Each node has N-1 connections (N-1 nearest neighbours) giving a total of N(N-1) / 2 connections for the network.
Even though this is the best network to have the high number of connections per node mean this network can only be implemented for small values of N. Therefore some form of limited interconnection network must be used.

So then there are various possibilities discussed (including the old token ring I used to work with mre than 25 years ago!), and here is what they have to say about hypercubes:

Hypercube networks consist of N = 2^k nodes arranged in a k dimensional hypercube.
The nodes are numbered 0 , 1, ....2^k -1 and two nodes are connected if their binary labels differ by exactly one bit.

K dimensional hypercube is formed by combining two k-1 dimensional hypercubes and connecting corresponding nodes i.e. hypercubes are recursive.
each node is connected to k other nodes i.e. each is of degree k

The departmental NCUBE is based on this topology i.e. a 5 dimensional hypercube (64 nodes)

You can't see the diagrams here, so just click on the link. Anyway, it seems then that this architecture is preferred because of address issues, and that the hypercube is derived from 'powers of two' connectivity, rather than the reverse.

Doesn't have anything to do with regular tessellations of an n-dimensional space.

So you would agree that given Kurzweils' assumptions, a single neuron floating in it's own vat with the connections I described to other neurons is functionally equivalent to all the neurons hooked up the regular way?

See, what I'm trying to establish here is that even granting the necessary assumptions for this scheme to work, this whole uploading thing still seems a bit problematical.

Regular tessellations of an n-dimensional space enter the massively parallel processors in this way.

Because squares tessellate the plane, I can have "graph paper" where each processor (a vertex) is connected to four ther processors (up, down, left, right) and extend this as far as a I like. I can stop asfter a finite numbr of steps and wrap this into a cylinder, and that reconnected to a torus, so if I go N steps in any direction I get back to where I started.

Similarly, I can do this with cubes filling Euclidean 3-space. Each processor is connected to six others (up, down, left, right, forward, backwards) and again can make a 3-torus.

Ditto for 4-D hypercubes in a hypermesh. This is relevant in doing Lattice Gauge Theory calculations for quantum chromodynamics, for instance.

Again, depending on architecture tradeoffs and the underlying problem being attacked and the software ate each node, this may or may not matter.

But lattices in n-space is also relevant to the error detecting error correcting codes. Something particularly beuatiful happens at dimension 24 (Leech lattice).

This may not matter to most applications, granted.

I'm sufficiently happy with the dialogue between Bruce Cohen and ScentOfViolets to consider myself un-needed there. I'm happy to have participated, but you guys are doing fine, and don't need me on any soapboxes (or soap hyperboxes).

I likewise avoid a tangent about whether Kurzweil means what he thinks he means when he talks about exponential growth, or the political underpinnings of the Rapture of Nerds crowd (which has a cult aspect not fun to discuss in public).

In essence there are 3 paths to immortality. The easiest is by reproduction; as a father I've done my share there. The standard professional path is by producing immortal work: a theorem, novel, paining, skyscraper, symphony, Constitution... Then, as Woody Allen said: "I don't want to be immortal by my work; I want to be immortal by not dying."

Uploading was a new idea there, but I believe in straight biology more, and we'll see who was more correct: Aubrey de Grey, Greg Benford, or Leroy Hood's Institute for Systems Biology.

The latter is the most AI-related and computationally intensive. How might one classify the challenges to Computational Systems Biology? My research goal since 1973 has been a computational theory of protein dynamics and evolution which unifies mechanisms from picosecond through organism lifetime through evolutionary time scales. This unification effort included my Ph.D. dissertation work at the University of Massachusetts, and those chapters of that dissertation which have been modified and subsequently published as refereed papers for international conferences The unification must describe the origin of complexity in several regimes, and requires bridging certain gaps in time scales, where previous theories were limited (as with the breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in certain surface catalysis and solvated protein phenomena). The unification also requires bridging different length scales, from nanotechnological to microscopic through mesoscopic to macroscopic. The unification at several scales involves nonlinear, kinetic, and statistical analysis connecting the behavior of individual molecules with ensembles of those molecules, and using the mathematics of Wiener convolutions, Laplace transforms, and Krohn-Rhodes decomposition of semigroups.

Recent laboratory results in several countries, including the ultrafast dynamics of femtochemistry and femtobiology, which probe the behavior of single molecules of enzyme proteins (i.e. my Harry Gray citation earlier), shed new light on the overarching problem, and confirm the practicality of that goal. The unification in contemporary terms requires building bridges – and compatible databases with interoperable software – between Chronomics, Genomics, Interactomics, Lipidomics, Metabolomics, Phenomics, Proteomics, Transcriptomics, and other fields.

The challenges to 21st Century Computational Biology include the need to perform measurements and integrated simulations over 28 orders of magnitude of time, as a means to study and to understand better the emergent, collective behaviors of molecular, metabolic, regulatory, neural, developmental, ecological, and evolutionary networks.

ScentOfViolets: OK, given the assumption that all those connections are functionally equivalent to the all the original connections when the neuron was in vivo (including global effects, like the hormones and neurotransmitters in the cerebral fluid), I can agree that the two situations are functionally equivalent. But I also agree that there are still problems with the uploading idea.

Here's one: the time required to do the job is still rather long. The problem is that you don't really get exponential speedups from using Bush Robots as surgeons because of limited bandwidth for all the connections; in such a small space, getting a decent SNR for any reasonable accuracy would result in massive interference and crosstalk between connections. And it's likely that the electric and EM fields from the connections would screw up the neuron potentials in the brain that was left: action potentials are, at most, in the hundreds of microvolts, with very low currents. So instead of doing large volumes of the brain at once, you'd probably be limited to working the perimeter of a two-dimensional patch on one layer at a time. I don't have time to do a realistic estimate of the bandwidth allowed and the time required, but my gut says we're talking about days.

The only thing about this argument against uploading is that some half-bright extropian is going to say that we don't know what will be possible with nanotechnology in x years, so we have to assume this is possible. There's no refuting that argument; it's an appeal to faith rather than reason.

I first heard about this incremental upload idea about 20 years ago; I was skeptical then, and I'm even more skeptical now, and some of that skepticism comes from seeing just how religious the arguments really are.

Ah, I see a source of difficulty here. I agree with you that the whole idea of uploading is rather silly when considered within anything but an sf context. Even if all the technical assumptions are granted.

Anyway, so we agree that we can stipulate that each neuron can be isolated in the manner described. After all, the neurons don't 'know' whether or not they're directly connected, right?

So suppose that you have these individual neurons contributing to the sum of the whole; what happens when one of them dies off? We'll arrange a 'fake' signal to be transmitted instead. Suppose that one neurons inputs and outputs are completely isolated in this manner. Or whole clusters. Well, there are identical - or nearly identical - neurons firing in the exact same way nearby, say, in the researchers heads, right? So why not just include those in our description? After all, there is still an isomorphism between the two systems, right?

But wait! There are neurons just like this all over the planet. Why bother with all this apparatus when by properly picking the right neurons out of everyone's head, we still get an exact description of the original neurological processes? After all, the individual neurons "don't know" where they're located, right? So what's the difference in whose head they're in, or if they're in a vat somewhere?

Try as I might, I can't think of a way to escape the conclusion that if you go in for the functional equivalence argument, you can't stop halfway. If you're willing to accept the premise that neurons that are simulated with the necessary degree of accuracy are indistinguishable in terms of results from the original template, you have to go along with the conclusion that it doesn't matter where they happen to be at any given point in time, or even if they're the 'same' neuron from instant to instant. All that matters is the functional equivalence. So either something's wrong with the basic theory of uploads, or the whole business is unnecessary anyway. Take your pick.

ScentOfViolets @234: So either something's wrong with the basic theory of uploads, or the whole business is unnecessary anyway

And people have been trying to tell you that the basic premises of the theory of uploads is flawed, at best, since 40-50 messages ago. Kurzweil's and the other extropians' conclusions follow from their premises pretty well, like many religious arguments, but the premises itself is only tenuously linked to reality.

ScentOfViolets @ 234: Well, wait a second. I do agree that the concept of uploading is rather questionable, but I'm not sure that argument works. It may be that all neurons are functionally identical*, but that doesn't mean that all neurons are identical. Even viewing a neuron as a deterministic Laplacian machine**, each neuron, or each instantiation of a neuron simulation, has a current state. This state may not be unique, but it can't be shared with any other neuron. So you can't reuse neurons in multiple places, because that would result in state sharing.

The state of a brain is the sum of the states of all the neurons; this can't be equated with just a subset of the neurons or with any one neuron just because they function in the same way. And by the way, the state space of the brain is humongous, because it's the product of the state spaces of all the neurons. So you can't equate the possible states of a neuron or some neurons with the entire brain.

* I doubt it, because there are different types of neuronal cells, probably more types than we've identified so far.
** Which I've already shown is untrue because of chaotic dynamics.

I took a stab at this a few years about (Feb 2005). Some of the specifics are already out of date and others are in hindsight just plain wrong, but it was fun to do then and still kinda fun to read now...

In a nutshell - I look more closely at changing economic social and political questions, since my primary focus is political future history. I'm more optimistic about space exploration but same as Mr. Stross says here, I agree it won't make a hill of beans' difference for most people.

I've also updated the particulars here a few times since, but I thought this might be of interest to a few in the gallery. :)

Well, wait a second. I do agree that the concept of uploading is rather questionable, but I'm not sure that argument works. It may be that all neurons are functionally identical*, but that doesn't mean that all neurons are identical. Even viewing a neuron as a deterministic Laplacian machine**, each neuron, or each instantiation of a neuron simulation, has a current state. This state may not be unique, but it can't be shared with any other neuron. So you can't reuse neurons in multiple places, because that would result in state sharing.

The state of a brain is the sum of the states of all the neurons; this can't be equated with just a subset of the neurons or with any one neuron just because they function in the same way. And by the way, the state space of the brain is humongous, because it's the product of the state spaces of all the neurons. So you can't equate the possible states of a neuron or some neurons with the entire brain.

I think I'm not explaining this very well. I'm saying that for one instant of time, perhaps measured in microseconds (or nanoseconds if you prefer), there is another neuron (or even just one synapse, if you think the effects are at that level) that is 'functionally equivalent' to the one we are considering representing in an upload. Half a jiffy later, it's no longer 'functionally equivalent' - but that's okay, because somewhere else, there's another neuron that is. (Note that I am assuming the Kurzwiellian position is true, and the that it is technologically possible to simulate a neuron to any arbitrary degree of accuracy. I am most definitely not saying that this sort of fidelity is really possible.) So really, given this 'functional equivalence', why bother with uploads at all?

This, btw, is something taken from Hofstaeder and Dennett in their book "The Minds I". I may have garbled this, so let me link to the relevant passage:

But now, ten centuries after the great project's birth, the world of these smug billions was about to explode. Two thinkers were responsible.
One of these, named Spoilar, had noticed one day that the neuron in his charge was getting a bit the worse for wear. Like any other man with a neuron in that state, he merely obtained another fresh one just like it and so replaced the particular one that had gotten worn-tossing the old one away. Thus he, like all the others, had violated the Cassanderish condition of "neural identity"-a condition never taken very seriously even by Cassanders. It was realized that in the case of an ordinary brain the cellular metabolism was always replacing all the particular matter of any neuron with other particular matter, forming precisely the same kind of neuron. What this man had done was really no more than a speeding up of this process. Besides, what if, as some Cassanders had implausibly argued, replacing one neuron by another just like it somehow resulted, when it was eventually done to all the neurons, in a new identity for the experiencer? There still would be an experiencer having the same experience every time the same patterns of firings were realized (and what it would mean to say he was a different experiencer was not clear at all, even to the Cassanders). So any shift in neural identity did not seem destructive of the fact of an experience coming about.
This fellow Spoilar, after he had replaced the neuron, resumed his waiting to watch his own neuron fire as part of an experience scheduled several hours later. Suddenly he heard a great crash and a great curse. Some fool had fallen against another man's bath, and it had broken totally on the floor when it fell. Well, this man whose bath had fallen would just

have to miss out on any experiences his neuron was to have been part of until the bath and neuron could be replaced. And Spoilar knew that the poor man had had one coming up soon.
The fellow whose bath had just broken walked up to Spoilar. He said "Look, I've done favors for you. I'm going to have to miss the impulse coming up in five minutes-that experience will have to manage with one less neuron firing. But maybe you'd let me man yours coming up later. I just hate to miss all the thrills coming up today!"
Spoilar thought about the man's plea. Suddenly, a strange thought hit him. "Wasn't the neuron you manned the same sort as mine?"
"Yes."
"Well, look. I've just replaced my neuron with another like it, as w all do occasionally. Why don't we take my entire bath over to the old position of yours? Then won't it still be the same experience brought about in five minutes that it would have been with the old neuron if we fire this then, since this one is just like the old one? Surely the bath's identity means nothing. Anyway, then we can bring the bath back here and I can use the neuron for the experience it is scheduled to be used for later on. Wait a minute! We both believe the condition of topology is baloney. So why need we move the bath at all? Leave it here; fire it fo yours; and then I'll fire it for mine. Both experiences must still come about. Wait a minute again! Then all we need do is fire this one neuron here in place of all the firings of all neurons just like it! Then there need,; be only one neuron of each type firing again and again and again to bring about all these experiences! But how would the neurons know even that they were repeating an impulse when they fired again and again? How would they know the relative order of their firings? Then we could have one neuron of each sort firing once and that would provide the physical realization of all patterns of impulses (a conclusion that would have been arrived at merely by consistently disregarding the necessity of synchronization in the progress from parted hemispheres to parted neurons). And couldn't these neurons simply be any of those naturally firing in any head? So what are we all doing here?"
Then an even more desperate thought hit him, which he expressed thus: "But if all possible neural experience will be brought about simply in the firing once of one of each type of neuron, how can any experiencer believe that he is connected to anything more than this bare minimum of physical reality through the fact of his having any of his experiences? And so all this talk of heads and neurons in them, which is supposedly based on the true discovery of physical realities, is undermined entirely. There may be a true system of physical reality, but if it involves all this physiology we have been hoodwinked into believing, it provides so

cheaply for so much experience that we can never know what is an actual experience of it, the physical reality. And so belief in such a system undermines itself. That is, unless it's tempered with Cassanderish principles."

Let's skip forward just a bit:

Well, one day there was trouble. Some men who had not been allowed to join the project had come at night and so tampered with the baths that many of the neurons in Spoilar's vicinity had simply died. Standing before his own dead neuron, staring at the vast misery around him, he thought about how the day's first experience must turn out for the experiencer when so many neuron firings were to be missing from their physical realization. But as he looked about he suddenly took note of something else. Nearly everyone was stooping to inspect some damaged equipment just under his bath. Suddenly it seemed significant to Spoilar that next to every bath there was a head, each with its own billions of neurons of all sorts, with perhaps millions of each sort firing at any given moment. Proximity didn't matter. But then at any given moment of a particular pattern's being fired through the baths all the requisite activity was already going on anyway in the heads of the operators-in even one of those heads, where a loose sort of proximity condition was fulfilled too! Each head was bath and cartridge enough for any spread-brain's realization: "But," thought Spoilar, "the same kind of physical realization must exist for every experience of every brain-since all brains are spreadable. And that includes mine. But then all my beliefs are based on thoughts and experiences that might exist only as some such floating cloud. They are all suspect-including those that had convinced me of all

this physiology in the first place. Unless Cassander is right, to some extent, then physiology reduces to absurdity. It undermines itself."
Such thinking killed the great project and with it the spread-brain. Men turned to other weird activities and to new conclusions about the nature of experience. But what these were is another story.

Again, I am suggesting that if what the uploading people think is true, the same assumptions that they need for their project leads to the absurdity above.

ScentOfViolets: Sorry I've been so dense; I understand what you're asking now, but I have to think about this for a while. I agree that the philosophical basis of uploading seems fishy, as well as the technical rationale, but I can't say just how. I think I'll go back and reread that whole story from "The Mind's I" and get back to you later.

X-phi is the currently trendy and perhaps revolutionary field of Experimental Philosophy. Giving cognantive (linguistic, ethical, financial) tasks to people while their brains are being scanned by fMRI is yielding results that challenge armchair philosophers of the past. Indeed, the icon of x-phi is an armchair on fire.

The Biology-Cognative Sciences/CS revolution that started in the 20th century and dominates the 21st century is not likely to be driven by thought experiments and by actual experiments.

Of course I think highly of Hofstaeder and Dennett. Hofstaeder published me in his Scientific American column and in an anthology from the column, and I hosted Dennett's sister at my home during a book tour. But that does not mean that I agree with all of what either has written.

I'd say that my central disagreement is not just replacing the cozy armchair with the armchair on fire. It is in firing. That is, I reject that what matters for a neuron is whether it fires or not at a given time. I have stated that the electrochemical waves in the axon, described by the H-H equations, are a small part (10% or less) of the information processing by neurons. I hold that 90%+ of information processing, thought, memory, are at the molecular level. I emphasize the protein dynamics. To oversimplify, the neuron firings are necessary to the local area network of the brain, interconnecting the molecular subsystems where the bulk of the work is being done at roughly a gigabit per second.

Nor should firing of neurons be considered to be like flipping of boolean switches. The coding is not analog, not digital, not AM, not FM, not pulse code modulation, but something specific to neurons and nervous systems.

When I started grad school in 1973, the textbooks said that the human brain had 10^10 neurons. Now neuroscientists joke that the human brain had 10^10 neurons, of which 10^11 are glial cells.

And what do the glial cells do? Are they just the "glue" that holds the brain together, as their name suggests? No. There are where RNA and proten activity is greatest. And when you interrupt that activity chemically, memories are not formed.

Even as I taught Astronomy at Cypress College (a job I got in part because the department Chairman got his PhD from Greg Benford) I hedged my bets about the Big Bang -- teaching what was known, but poiting to anomalies in the paradigm. Even as I taught genetics and microneuranatomy, I taught what the standards demanded, but hedged my bets, suggesting to the students that "gene" is not a useful word any more, and that "neuron" may not be where their consciousness resides.

The exception and exceptions to the exceptions to the pre-200 A.D. textbooks, from which I was forced by State Standards to cover when I taught Chem, Bio, Anatmy & PHysiology, mean that it takes a semester to torture the word "gene" into being meaningful to students. Too many epicycles. New paradigm is not gene-centric, but data-driven network-centric. "Junk DNA" which is 10 times more than "genes" is in fact functional. As with Dark Matter being 10 times more than luminous matter, and glial cells being 10 times more than old-school neurons. Epigenetic factors matter. Evo-Devo is real science.

There is a revolution occurring in the biological sciences. It took off just a couple of years ago [i.e. 2000-2001] and is now clearly visible in the literature. Some scientists in the field like to refer to the development as the birth of systems biology, whereas others prefer not to put a label on what is happening.

Modern molecular biology was born with the discovery that genetics is based on nucleic acid chemistry (Watson and Crick 1953), and one way to define it is to say that molecular biology is a large box of tools to do genetics by manipulating DNA. This definition may sound disheartening, but its positive side is that the tools can be applied to all aspects of biology to solve essentially all scientific problems that may arise.

One result of molecular biology is large-scale sequencing of genomes from a rapidly growing number of organisms. Genome sequencing is not possible without the use of computers with large memory and tools to handle the enormous amounts of data that are generated in the massive sequencing efforts. The need for data handling led to another box of tools, called bioinformatics, which is now an established part of molecular biology. However, when all this sequence data got into computers, it became obvious that the genetic blueprints by themselves tell us very little about the functional behavior of cells and multicellular organisms; that is, about what we really want to know about biological systems. In this way, the human genome project, which is perhaps the most spectacular success of molecular biology, also meant that a vast space of future research of a radically different kind became visible. To understand the causal connections between genotype and phenotype will require a very significant expansion of the traditional toolbox used by molecular biologists. It must include concepts and techniques from many other scientific disciplines such as physics, mathematics, numerical analysis, stochastic processes, and control theory. Many novel tools that do not exist today must be forged to understand how dynamic, adapting, and developing systems can emerge from the information buried in the genomes.

This question of the nature of genes is one of my interests as well; I'd like to amplify on what JvP said.

In the beginning was Mendel, with the notion of 1 gene = 1 inherited characteristic, and a gene can be either dominant or recessive. Then we learned that one "characteristic"* can be influenced by multiple "genes"**. Then we learned that one "gene" can influence more than one "characteristic". And then we learned that domininance and recessivity were not the only possibilities; often "genes" could express themselves in greater or lesser degree.

Along came Watson, Crick, and Franklin, and said that the "genes" must be segments of DNA, so the total DNA of a cell represented all of its genetic information. Breaking the DNA code showed that the segments were integral numbers of 4-base-pair "codons" with start and stop codons to delimit individual gene information. And each gene mapped to a protein whose amino acid sequence it specified, one codon per amino acid. So what we had thought of as an inheritied "characteristic" could be determined by any number of "genes" depending on what proteins were involved in its expression. Then we learned that there was genetic information outside a cell's DNA in all eukaryotic organisms, and that some bacteria didn't use DNA at all.

And then the human genome was sequenced and we learned that a large part (perhaps 95%) of the DNA in a human cell did not encode the amino acid sequence of some protein. And we found that a lot of those so-called "junk" DNA segments were parts of "genetic expression networks": constellations of "genes" which control the amount of expression of a gene which does code for a protein. Some control "genes" directly augment or inhibit the expression of particular other "genes". Some are parts of complex networks with feedback loops that augment and inhibit other parts of the network, many of which are feedback loops that ...

So tell me now, what's a gene?

* Scare quotes are used here to indicate the entities that theory described were not necessarily represented by unique and individual physical entities. In other words, theories of genetics up to the present did not carve nature at the joints, as the saying goes.
** i.e., by some entities on demonstrably different parts of whatever is recording the genetic information.

ScentOfViolets: After re-reading the Arnold Zuboff piece in The Mind's I, and Hofstadter and Dennet's reflections on it, and pondering its relation to uploading, I think I see yet another objection to the idea of uploading, but it's not really philosophical, so much as yet another argument to the impossibility of the basic premises of the idea.

Consider what Zuboff never mentions, but what H&D point out: that there is a fundamental problem with providing the input stimulus that causes all the activity in the brain*. Note that proprioception is part of that sensory input; even without sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, there is still input from all parts of the body grounding the mind in a physical existence. Providing a fully consistent and sufficiently comprehensive set of inputs for any length of time is an extremely complex task; we don't know just how complex because we really don't understand the brain well enough to know what the requirements are.

But this is not a philosophical objection as such; it's no different from my issues with lack of knowledge about what the brain actually does, and what the precise function of the neurons is.

The other argument that H&D bring up, similar to mine, is that replacing "identical neurons", i.e., those with identical function, with a single neuron, is logically ridiculous because it misunderstands the nature of a neuron (or any other "state machine" that we could use to create a computational state). See my previous posts for that. Is this a philosophical objection? I think not; it simply says that the assumptions for the philosophical argument are false to facts in any physical universe that supports neural networks, natural or artificial.

I still believe that the ideas behind Zuboff's simulation of the brain's connections, and uploading's simulations of the connections and the neurons, are incoherent, and can't produce cases which can be examined usefully by philosophical tools, because they can't exist in the physical world as we know it. Examining counterfactuals is a well-respected philosophical tradition, but it fails when we're attempting to make statements about systems which do exist in the real world, like brains and minds. Certainly it fails to provide any useful argument about uploading if the assumptions for the existence of uploading are physically incorrect and/or incoherent.

* The overall architecture of the brain is driven by sensory input; if there's no input, the brain states just drift, and eventually the person whose brain it is goes insane. I think this indicates that a brain, and the mind it implements, must be connected to an outside reality, and one which is very hard to counterfeit, at that.

Potentially big news! Stephen Wolfram has just 'come out' - he's claiming to have built an AGI engine on top of 'Mathematica', his team of 100 has been working in secret:

"One of the most surprising aspects of this project is that Wolfram has been able to keep it secret for so long. I say this because it is a monumental effort (and achievement) and almost absurdly ambitious. The project involves more than a hundred people working in stealth to create a vast system of reusable, computable knowledge, from terabytes of raw data, statistics, algorithms, data feeds, and expertise. But he appears to have done it, and kept it quiet for a long time while it was being developed."

ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2009) — Harvard scientists have cleared a key hurdle in the creation of synthetic life, assembling a cell’s critical protein-making machinery in an advance with both practical, industrial applications and that advances the basic understanding of life’s workings....

“The reason it is a step toward artificial life is that the key component of all living systems is the ribosome, which does protein synthesis. It is the most conserved and one of the most complicated biological machines,” Church said....

{JVP: note that the nanomachines called ribosomes are most active in the brain within those glial cells I've mentioned. Manufacturing all the proteins in a single cells, orienting them, and sticking them on a membrane, accounts for 10^9 bits/second in that single cell. Hence my belief that this is the high-thoughput substrate in which memory and mind reside.}

And if that's so.. who's to say that we haven't already given rise to an AI.. and it's already skipped town?

I've read that Google, which owns probably more computing power than any other entity in the world, is taking seriously the possibility of some kind of "self-directed software" emerging on their servers, and is keeping an eye out for unexplained "computation sinks" -- processes that do not seem to do anything useful. So far they found nothing.

This week Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, described how the state should analyse data about individuals in order to find terrorist suspects: travel information, tax, phone records, emails, and so on. "Finding out other people's secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules," he said, because we'll need to screen everyone to find the small number of suspects.

There is one very significant issue that will always make data mining unworkable when used to search for terrorist suspects in a general population, and that is what we might call the "baseline problem": even with the most brilliantly accurate test imaginable, your risk of false positives increases to unworkably high levels, as the outcome you are trying predict becomes rarer in the population you are examining. This stuff is tricky but important. If you pay attention you will understand it. ...

And lastly, there is the problem of validating your algorithms, and calibrating your detection systems. To do that, you need training data: 10,000 people where you know for sure if they are suspects, to compare your test results against. It's hard to picture how that can be done.

I'm not saying you shouldn't spy on everyday people: I'll leave the morality and politics to those less nerdy than me. I'm just giving you the maths on specificity, sensitivity, and false positives.

Hi Charles. Your colleague David Brin dropping in (at suggestion of some mutual fans). Let's hoist a few, some time.

May I comment on one portion about which I am - well - considered a bit of an authority?

CS said : "Bruce Schneier has opined that the key political hot potato of the 21st century will be the question, "how do we maintain the concept of privacy in an age of ubiquitous communications and surveillance", and some believe that privacy is already dead. Given the way Moore's Law is taking us towards an essentially unlimited ability to record everything, I'm not able to argue with the inevitability of surveillance: what I'd dispute is the morality of it.)"

Alas Bruce Schneier tends to be simpleminded, for a very smart guy. He goes in for Bad dichotomies. And no field is more rife with them than the topic of freedom/privacy/transparency.

A qualifier. You'll hear that the author of "The Transparent Society" is anti-privacy. That's a damned lie. I devote a whole chapter to how vital personal privacy is, to feeling human. I think we should fight to retain some. Moreover, I think it is possible. Then how will we keep some, in a society in which the proliferation of cameras appears unstoppable?

Not by legislation. (Heinlein said "Privacy Laws only make the bugs smaller.")

Not by Euro-style Privacy Commissions.

Not by trusting any elite that promises not to look. (They always will.)

But yes, by engaging in the activity that gave us the privacy - and freedom - we now have in the 1st place! Sousveillance, or looking-back from below. Everybody knowing most of what's going on, and being able to catch the peeping toms.

Look, I won't convince you with a sentence here and there. It is complex and (apparently) counter-intuitive. But I will say this, if we are doomed, by technological determinism, to a situation you find morally intolerable, it is usually a strong sign of a bad dichotomy, I suggest you re-examine the dichotomy.

Firstly, forgive me for not reading all 252 comments (at the time when I start writing this) but I'd just like to pick at one small numbers related part of your post.
You say that 99.999% of people won't get to participate in the singularity, or the space colonization. Using a conservative estimate of six billion people that leaves about sixty thousand people in your estimate who will. If we have sixty thousand people in space....
What was the smallest genetically stable starting population for humans again?

The first point is perhaps the most important. If we can't feed ourselves, we can't continue being a civilization.

Soylent green... err.. I mean mycoprotein factories powered by alternative-electricity are perhaps the high-tech way to go, but considering that plants are still our best energy harvesters, highly biodiverse, high productivity farms that require low energy, labor and chemical inputs are the best option for my money. See: http://www.scribd.com/doc/12861937/Natural-Farming

Combining this type of high efficiency farming and the possibility of WiMax++, I wonder if even a small de-urbanization trend is possible.

"Sousveillance" sounds like a winner to me, not only to trace the surveillance but repay the favor.

Deterring the abuse of surveillance is key, I think, and the unspoken paradigm is one we can take from another technological sea change that posed its own set of bad dichotomies - the mating of thermonuclear weaponry with global-range rocketry.

Because...

1. Any arms treaty regime will be subverted
2. No international policing is effective
3. You can't trust people capable of building 'em not to do so.

So what are the options?

A. Non-proliferation, which is weakly effective at limiting who gets to have nukes and concentrates who gets to be high-handed on account they have them and anyone else who tries is a rogue state by definition.. until they manage to get their own
B. Interdiction technologies - any tech capable of zapping several dozen (never mind several thousand) warheads out of the sky would be the makings of a much deadlier strategic weapon and then you are back to square one.
C. Deterrence - But...that's crazy talk. What kind of a track record does that have? Oh, yes. Almost 69 years since the last nukes were launched in anger.

In a "mutually assured disclosure" regime, the latter being the nuclear war analogue, it only takes one very damaging disclosure to make the point, no matter how mighty the affected personage or institution may be.

Is it a happy world? Not any more or less than now.

But it is a world where people pick and choose who to point their gear at and, if they do, what to share about what they know.

And in a truly advanced surveillance civilization, where passive detection can tell who is looking and when and what activities or data are catching the attention of perusers, the risks of crossing the line (as object or observer) might be more transparent to all parties involved.

This is not to say we may experience some sort of moral millennium. I doubt that very much from what I have experienced of online and virtual living.

But the values set most certainly will change, in some ways costing individual freedom even absent the "physical" (say, direct) presence of others, and likewise setting up costs of access to certain classes of information (fines, lawsuits, social opprobrium, jail time...) or abuse of same.

But ultimately this thread of social adjustment to surveillance technology will be heavily informed by what else is going on in the world - both the physical and the virtual - and what power focuses develop to decide what the range of choices are, and then who is in position to see their will translated into the choices that are made.

And post facto, whoever makes those choices is going to be pretty happy with the outcome.

We should do our utmost to ensure we (or strong advocates of our preferences) are at that table.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 13, 2009) — It may be possible to "read" a person's memories just by looking at brain activity, according to research carried out by Wellcome Trust scientists. In a study published in the journal Current Biology , they show that our memories are recorded in regular patterns, a finding which challenges current scientific thinking....

The mind scanning helmets are cute, but I suspect we all leak enough information anyway that they're not strictly necessary. If you're twittering every few minutes, it is very hard to hide what makes you tick.

I saw an article in New Scientist asking why people blush. It's the same thing, to be seen to leak information. Otherwise, what are you hiding? Can't be trusted if you never blush.

Of course there is an arms race to "leak" deceptively, and to see through such deception. I think (hope) that on balance it is much harder to deceive than to see through deception.

Hopefully any AI will be leaky enough while it is sub-human that we can give it a proper upbringing, and have it grow into a well mannered post-singular entity.

The global guerrillas are an interesting instance of old religions using new technology to scale. Hopefully it's just a transitional form.

Hope! Believe! Change! Welcome to our brave new/old world... or did you think Obama meant something different by "believe"?

David @252 (and others): sousveillance is a nice idea. Unfortunately, current politics militates against it (as do some other human social practices): here in the UK we've just had a law passed that makes it an imprisonable offense (for up to 10 years!) to photograph or film a police officer if the information "might be of use to terrorists". (Spot the might in that sentence.) Meanwhile, in France, in an attempt to deal with happy slapping (which involves neither slapping nor happiness) they've legislated to making filming a violent assault a crime of complicity -- which in addition to achieving the desired goal, would make the folks who filmed the police misconduct in the Rodney King beating and the Oscar Grant murder equally liable. Finally, a couple of years ago, some fun web dudes put a webcam outside the front door of a cabinet minister whose portfolio included crime and CCTV surveillance. It lasted all of 24 hours after somebody mentioned it to the Police.

Upshot: I don't believe any incumbent government -- elected or otherwise -- will permit a state of sousveillance to emerge without a fight; it's too personally threatening to them. There are more nutters who'd like to have a fireside chat with $POLITICIAN and shotgun than we like to imagine (as witness the number of assassination attempts on Bill Clinton or -- to date -- Barack Obama); it gets even worse when you consider violent political extremists like the Continuity IRA or ETA. That, in and of itself, is the turd in the punchbowl.

(I'm probably going to close this comment thread in the next day or so, but I'll open a new one with a new posting in a short while.)